Conceived for eight people in an outdoor woodland space, Slowlo is performed indoors against a city skyline at dusk. A clod of earth, a bowl of rose water, dirty clothes and primeval song are reminders of the original forest setting.

Despite the electricity, it must have been cold enough for a naked performer. Nic Green, known for persuading scores of female audience members to strip for Trilogy at Edinburgh Festival Fringe, duly takes off all her clothes. I feel a faintly British sense of embarrassment, and relief when they’re back on again. But it’s OK – she’s kindly already told us that the attention can wander.

Slowlo is a meditation on a year of solitude in south-west Scotland – a year that included hours and days of silence, poetry, bird watching, yoga, being half-buried in earth for a week, Henry David Thoreau, seasons passing, and making friends with the postman. A trucker called Kevin, the narrator’s nearest and only neighbour, conveniently provides something of a plot by throwing himself under a passing train, thereby avoiding any more 4.30am starts. He leaves a cryptic text message saying ‘two deer’.

The piece can be sententious if not pretentious. The voice that is skilfully projected in the final bellows seems overly ponderous at the start, making the scene-setting a bit heavy-handed. The movement is strong yet comes in snatches, raising the question as to whether the fusion of genres (dance, storytelling, physical theatre, song, etcetera) has a price, achieving breadth but making the depth contrived.

Nic’s mantra of ‘calm activity’, a focus of the year as the seasons take their circular course, is perhaps an acquired taste. The audience is absorbed, connected, serious, yet this sort of engagement involves a wrench from the Evening Standard, water bottle, Oyster card and commuter crush of a London night. A cynic might question the cost of such a retreat, and whether such a contrast preyed on Kevin’s mind.

There is plenty of warmth and dedication in the performance. Even at the start, people bravely smell and sip the rose water that is passed round the audience circle. By the end, we exchange names – it seems a little deliberate, hard but important, and Nic says to everyone ‘I see you’, with a reassuring twinkle in the eye. However, expectations were high and this specific piece, stranded without a site, is not startling, yet.