The Disappearance of Sadie Jones enacts the Newton’s cradle mutual rebound between the eponymous heroine’s mental illness and the reality around her. The form is kaleidoscopic, the chronology dislocated, the viewpoint subjective, and the world artfully disorientating. The characters of Sadie’s sister and lover drift through other identities, archetypal (‘the dead’), allegorical (a swindling barrow boy) and historical (her parents), frequently stepping apart from the action as narrator or chorus.

The motor of this is the shattered verse of Hannah Silva’s script – ‘libretto’, more precisely – meticulously staged by the writer herself as an intricate suite of fugues in three voices. In performance, the spartan text is conjured into shimmering gamelan lushness, interleaved layers pivoting about shared catchwords, superimposed, staggered, coalescing into riffs and refrains then diverging via counterpoint into cacophony. Silva develops this voice from the queasy admixture of the delusional and the everyday with which the piece opens so that, over the course of the 80 minutes, the strands untwist into one register that is fully naturalistic and another which has imploded into pre-articulate rhythmic syllables and yells, before, like the chronology, the two are neatly re-braided into a loop. The ensemble’s handling of this impossible material is virtuosic, shading both tiny naturalistic detail and jagged expressionist sprechgesang, sometimes manipulating the text at arm’s length like a puppet made of words, sometimes inhabiting it as passionately as scripture. An enterprising – and fearless – radio commissioning editor would not have to dig far to find treasure here.

The physical staging is theatrically literate: Lecoq via Complicité; Berkoff via Frantic; DV8 and Pina Bausch swigged straight from the bottle. Nothing about it is careless or slipshod, but this visual-physical language and the text don’t always quite succeed in dancing together. Conspicuously, the best moments of physical theatre are silent, the most telling text delivered in stillness.

From title to curtain, Sadie is the focal character – her surname, indeed, a hint to read her as an Everywoman – but this is an ensemble piece with only starring roles, and all three performers rise to its substantial demands. Elizabeth Crarer, as Sadie’s sister, is as cut-glass, as soothing and fragile as the whiskey glass to which she frequently resorts; Alan Humphreys as Sadie’s lover, as tightly-buttoned as his defining shiny suit jacket; Stephanie Greer’s Sadie is – like the decal on the mug she nurses habitually – a plait-haired La Calavera Catrina, the dapper skeleton of the Dia de los Muertos. Her facial expressions (she might plausibly have been the model for Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride) are huge, and when she flashes from a smile to eerie blankness, it’s like the lights have dipped.

That each character comes equipped with a talismanic prop is thoroughly representative of the mise-en-scène, which is a study in the engraving of meaning into small details. The principle – an engagingly literal cross-application of the compositional strategy which underpins the text – is to forage among the mundane and naturalistic for small highly tactile everyday textures (apples, a Pyrex bowl, a tap, rough wooden crates), and then to fling them into greatly more abstract theatrical space, where the text can pump signification into them. Hard not to love a show which painstakingly enrobes a bowl of Cheerios as a metaphor for a comforting but brittle inauthenticity. The most striking image – a meal table vanitas banquet of apples and bones – provides a commentary on its own method, punningly, a nature morte, objects displayed to be decoded.

Designer Fiona Chivers’ hard-working set piece is a breakfast bar, made of slabs of concrete and unfinished wood, which alludes to banal Elle Deco chic but does symbolic duty as catafalque, podium, pulpit, bathroom, bed, table, market stall, chalkboard and gravestone. By turns it is sat, stood, and lain upon, beside and beneath, as well as spun round, and shuttled from one end of the stage to the other. There is something of the show pony about this, but such ingenuity is entitled to prance a little.

Words are summoned from fresh air and evaporate back thence; properties accumulate stubbornly. Once a bowl of spilled cereal has had its close up, Mr DeMille, it lurks in vision, mugging and waving to camera over the shoulders of the action. Even the most cathected mess remains nevertheless, a mess, and the detritus of discarded props with which the stage is cluttered by the end is an encumbrance the text would never be permitted. To be sure, it’s iconic of disorder, but visually cliché and symbolically reductive compared to the nuance with which the words crackle. In the meeting of the object and the voice, Silva the poet and Silva the director’s interests sometimes conflict, and she decides in favour of the poetry. The earthbound concreteness of the physical emphasises the fleetness of the poetry precisely by lagging behind its temporal and spatial zigzags, but service of the text in this respect isn’t necessarily service of the piece.

Staging mental illness is a Faustian bargain: human compassion jostles with the carny’s prurience. From Euripides to Homeland, the mad woman has been reliably bankable dramatic currency, but the politics of this spectacle are fraught. No doubt everyone’s heart here is in the right place, but it is nevertheless not unproblematic to depict a (young, beautiful) doomed young woman’s deliverance from mental illness by death. Sadie is vivid and compelling and barely held to account for the havoc wrought around her: she is exonerated by the beauty and poetry of her world. The production as a whole attempts the same feat. The Strindbergian dream play format is no longer a shock, but a knowing negotiation with theatrical history. It is no longer a radical insight that psychosis and language are entwined, but it’s still a spectacular premise for art-making. The Disappearance of Sadie Jones is a beautiful theatrical object, but the acrobatics of the formal and linguistic jeux d’esprit, the sophisticated theatricality, are gorgeous in ways I suspect first-hand experience of psychosis almost certainly isn’t.