Ah, a room full of junk furniture and cardboard boxes, and we are allowed – encouraged, even – to wander around and rummage. All of this waiting for us! How exciting! I open one. It’s full of green polystyrene balls – packaging – and at the bottom is a pen, and a provocation: What was the first thing you remember owning? In another box: Name something you have broken. In another box I find a man’s suit jacket. In another a chintzy side-lamp. Looking around the room, I see a lot of chintzy side-lamps, some lit some not. There are a number of battered old hi-fi music centres and record players. In a pile of vinyl albums tossed on the floor I spot the faces of Petula Clark, Herb Albert, and Al Johnson in minstrel make-up. A Cliff Richard Christmas album is amongst a pile of CDs that once came free with newspapers. Meanwhile, we hear the strains of an easy-listening classic: ‘What the World Needs Now is Love Sweet Love”. A waltz popular with ice-dancers, I believe. There’s an old Bakelite phone (the type with a dial face) on a rickety side-table. Filing cabinets. Broken light fittings. Tables and chairs, mismatched. A worn and scratched brown leather sofa. And on the floor some more cardboard boxes that have ‘sit on me’ scrawled on them. So we do.

The Object Lesson is, unsurprisingly, about objects. And about memories. And about constructing narratives – how we tell ourselves and others stories. How stories change depending on time passing and context told. What do we keep (objects, people, memories), and what do we throw away?

The storyteller is Geoff Sobelle from Rainpan 43 and Pig Iron Theatre – award-winning Aurora Nova artist (previously seen in All Wear Bowlers, and Flesh and Blood & Fish and Fowl, both of which went on to London International Mime Festival success). He’s a masterful clown – and although this isn’t a clown show per se, his phenomenal skills as a performer who has the audience eating out of his hands (literally at one point) derive from his clown training and years of experience in physical devising and ‘le jeu’ – the game, the play.

This game is played in the round, with Geoff Sobelle sitting, standing, table-dancing (in ice skates), climbing, box-emptying, bread-breaking, wine-swigging, talking on the phone, wooing a girl in the audience with a romantic dinner, staring at a set of traffic lights flickering from red to amber to green – and ultimately portraying a whole lifetime of life, love, dreams, ambitions, and setbacks through the silent emptying out of what seems to be a bottomless box; a time capsule holding a whole world of experiences, from cradle to grave.

Sobelle gives a faultless performance – aided and abetted by director David Neumann, installation designer Steven Dufala, lighting designer Christopher Kuhl, and sound designer Nick Kourtides. Between them, this uber-creative team manage the playful interaction between a roomful of phones, tape-recorders, record-players, speakers, lights, lamps, and torches, most of which start out in cardboard boxes.

This is the show that has stayed with me from this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe – the show above all others I’d recommend anyone to see. All human life is here – embodied in the everyday objects we live with, cherish, break, discard. The Object Lesson is a groundbreaking show – an extraordinary achievement.