Demon, daemon, fiend. Christianity traditionally places the demon, a spiritual entity that can be conjured or controlled, in binary opposition to the good and the godly. Many ancient mythologies see gods and demons as one and the same. In Bali, a black-and-white chequered flag is at every household or temple door, reminding the guest that good and evil co-exist and need to be balanced. According to Wim Vandekeybus, a demon could manifest as a wizard, a healer, nothingness, the Id, a clown. In Talk to the Demon, he and his company Ultima Vez investigate the relationship between the human and the demon that constantly walks with or within him or her. This is played out onstage, controversially, by two small children, one representing ‘innocence’ and one ‘experience’, forming the two halves of one character –a kind of budding everyman/everywoman whose thoughts, desires, dreams and fears are enacted onstage. Mostly, the younger boy-child orchestrates the game-playing, and the girl-child witnesses, comments and occasionally joins in. Trick or treat?

At times, it’s like a staging of Lord of the Flies, the adults playing children who are fighting to the death over a piece of chocolate or a tangerine. These sections are Bouffon-like in their use of the classic outsider-insider ensemble games most often associated with Jacques Lecoq. People are bullied, hung by their heels, locked in boxes. A mocking list, announced with childlike-glee, details things we could conjure up for ourselves – ‘a big ball to live on… a place you can send your children to so you can get rid of them all day… a bomb that could obliterate a whole city!’ The ‘innocent’ small child orders all the grown-ups to become cows (echoes of the ancient association of oxen with daemons in many religions and mythologies), then they are mocked for being cows: ‘Look at yourselves – you are dead. No thoughts, no insults, no music’. This last a refrain that is repeated often throughout the show. The child later demands that they all hang themselves – which they do.

In this onstage dreamworld, death is omnipresent, but the dead don’t lie down. A bullied man seemingly beaten to death dances up, grinning – victim becomes bully becomes victim becomes bully in a terrible, eternal game of soldiers. At some points, it is like a particularly grotesque computer game being played live. ‘Am I going to die?’ asks the child, and the adults bluster distressed answers: ‘We are all going to die!’ ‘When are you going to die?’ comes the retort. There’s some sort of resolution when the (older) child decides that when she dies she wants to come back as a clown. So of course she does.

The question of child abuse looms large – Wim Vandekeybus shies away from depicting sexual abuse, but the physical and emotional abuse of children is hinted at constantly and occasionally played out graphically (albeit with the darkest of humour). I’m on the edge of discomfort and protectiveness in some scenes – and I suspect that it is this aspect of the show that prompts the many audience walk-outs witnessed on its opening night at the Brighton Festival. I’m reminded of the furore around Romeo Castellucci’s Purgatorio when this was presented in the UK – although I feel Vandekeybus succeeds where Castellucci failed in exploring abuse in a palatable way onstage. Just about.

Vandekeybus defends adamantly his choice of using child actors, and it can be argued that the onstage horrors are very obviously game-playing, and that the content of his violent theatrical fairytale is no worse than many stories by the Brothers Grimm that we regularly tell to very young children. The witches, hairy beasts, and torturers of our classic fairy tales are seen by many modern interpreters as the manifestations of aspects of the self. Theatrical devices traditionally used to depict horror or to make it clear that this is ‘not real’– such as slapstick, shadow work, stylised movement theatre, and carnivalesque grotesquery – are employed in great measure in Talk to the Demon.

Sound plays a crucial role in this production, but there is no composed soundtrack – a radical departure for a renowned choreographer who made his name over the past quarter of a century with his integration of contemporary music and experimental dance. There is, though, a great soundscape, created live by contact mics on equipment such as a metal ‘wall’, creating a harrowing booms as stones are thrown at it; or by the live playing and mixing by the small child of a number of mic’d-up percussion instruments and objects such a tinkling music-box, which are set on a console stage-left.

There is also a great deal of spoken text, much of which is used in the subversive way that companies such as Station House Opera and Forced Entertainment use words, meanings twisted, played with or re-evaluated. (Indeed, Forced Entertainment actor Jerry Killick is to be found here in the cast of Talk to the Demon, which features an interesting mix of actors and dancers.) There are orders and provocative questions (‘Do you love me?’), parodies of parent-child or teacher-child dialogues, lists, taunts, monologue (including a very long rumination on the nature of war by ‘an old general’), and direct address to the audience – which often ‘fails’ in the environment of the Dome, as it has a large stage looking out into a large auditorium – with spotlights shining into the performers’ eyes, they doubtless could hardly see the audience. Perhaps the questions were rhetorical, and no answer expected?

There is dance – visceral, engaging, featuring bodies of many shapes and sizes – but it is just one of many elements in this production, and often feels secondary to the rest of the physical, visual and aural action. Ultima Vez might be a dance company, but Vandekeybus, who has previously branched out into film directing, is bored with being typecast as the granddaddy of postmodern ‘Eurocrash’ dance and has thus decided to make a theatre piece. As Vandekeybus is choreographer, director and scenographer of the piece, which was co-devised with the company, the guiding eye of a dramaturg might have been helpful. The piece is too long, and has a number of odd dips and rises in pace and structure.

‘We force you to make choices; but in fact you quickly come to feel that you are being influenced on all sides and that a simple choice doesn’t exist’ says Vandekeybus in an interview with Charlotte de Somviele reprinted in the programme for the show. In the reviewing of Talk to the Demon, I have tried not to be influenced on all sides by the audience walk-outs and the scathing comments about the production on social media – to try to stay true to what I really think and feel. I realise that I have no idea what I ‘think’, but that I know that I feel energised, stimulated, disturbed, irritated, and entertained by Talk to the Demon, and that’s a pretty good result from a night at the theatre. Vandekeybus has been lauded and vilified in equal measure over the past 25 years – and no doubt will continue to shake things up for as long as he continues to make work, in whatever medium he chooses to make it.