When you book a train seat, do you like to face forwards or backwards? I always opt for backwards. Forwards and you are hurtling into the future, trees and cars and people a blur as you pass them by. Backwards and the past recedes from you, stretching out into eternity. You have time to take it all in; to contemplate your relationship to the world around you.

Rear View builds on that idea. Literally – they’ve built a special open-air bus in which all the seats face backwards, this marvellous beast created by veteran street theatre company IOU’s director David Wheeler, in collaboration with maker extraordinaire Andy Plant. The show’s audience are taken on a journey through the streets of Blackpool or Halifax or Norwich or, in this case, Brighton accompanied – not quite led, not quite followed – by a young woman, who we take to be the ghost/alter ego/younger self (pick your metaphor) of an older woman looking back on her life.

There is spoken text – beautiful and evocative poetic text, written and performed by one of two young women artists. On my trip, it was Brighton born and bred performance poet/playwright Cecilia Knapp, who alternates shows with Jemima Foxtrot. The text is conveyed to us through state-of-the-art headphones and (we presume) a bluetooth connection. Then, there is the sheer pleasure of travelling through a city on an open air bus, facing backwards, feeling the breeze on your skin, smelling the ozone of the sea. And there is the marvellous framing of the landscape that occurs with each scheduled stop – and indeed at any moment on the journey. Everyone and everything becomes part of the artwork. A dissolute looking man stands at the gate of Sussex Gardens (where Lewis Carroll’s Alice first encountered the White Rabbit), looking pensively at his watch. Are we late? An elderly couple make their way painfully slowly along the promenade as the sun dips down over the sea: they are not arm-in-arm, they are struggling along independently, each intent on their own journey. A young couple are standing on a street corner, talking intensely, close to arguing. A mother pushes a pram with one hand, trying to text with the other. Meanwhile, our narrator – dressed in a very costume-y asymmetrical white dress, marking her out from the landscape as someone or something not quite here, not quite ‘everyday’ or of the present moment – stands leaning against the promenade rail looking out to sea, telling stories of the man in the bar who always asks her to lend him her ears for the afternoon; or peers into a Kemptown cafe window, remembering the woman who smelt of bleach, peppermint and liquorice Rizlas; or glances up at the bird perched on top of the gasworks tower in the industrial estate, whilst she tells us how and why she got her bird tattoo.

Framing is everything, which is why the show starts not on the bus, but in a makeshift art studio. We are invited into a life-drawing class and briefly instructed in the art of looking, sizing up, framing the figure (Cecilia in her white dress) – really seeing what is in front of us. This device, together with the choice to have the two performers alternating shows, is a handy way of making it possible for the company to run a number of shows in a day without too long a changeover time… I mention these practical dramaturgical decisions as a way of noting that IOU are one of the UK’s most experienced outdoor arts / site-responsive theatre companies, and these matters of structure and timing are something they have a lot of experience managing.

Talking of responding to site, we have an interesting situation here. The texts – each performer has written her own version – are a response to a brief to develop short poetic texts voiced as a fictional older woman looking back on her life, to be presented in a number of suggested generic sites, e.g. (and I am guessing here, I don’t know the brief): in an art studio, outside a cafe, in a run-down urban setting, in a place of natural beauty, near a postbox. The text thus interacts with the site it is placed in, staying the same in form but changing in resonance from location to location as the show tours. So there is a universality to the story (exploring as it does such everywoman experiences as self-image, being the subject of the gaze, the tide of memories as we age, losing people along the road of life through bereavement or other circumstances) and a specificity evoked by the text placed in that particular setting, with the audience’s relationship to the place another factor. Like many people on that bus, I have my own memories of and relationship with Brighton Marina, Kemptown’s vintage shops and cafes, and the seafront – and my own memories and imaginative wanderings worked in tandem with the text I was hearing and the sights I was seeing. Rear View is therefore a show that evokes and invites a complex relationship with site.

It is not a perfect piece of work (that would be asking a lot), but it is a very good one. My reservations include finding the music backing track (an ambient wallpaper-ish mix of piano and synth) a little disappointing – I get that the aim was unobtrusive ambient, but I find this sort of easy-listening synth-driven composition a little irritating, and found myself asking: where is Clive Bell when you need him most. But in the interests of fairness, no one else I have spoken to had this response; most barely noticed the music, feeling it blended in with everything else in a satisfactory way. There is also something about the way Cecilia was sometimes ahead of us unseen and sometimes behind us and visible that jarred slightly. I was particularly bothered by a scene where she got into a car that followed us. It took us away from the illusion that she was a ghostly figure who was haunting the spots that we arrived in, being there in place as we turned a corner, so that we encountered her in each new setting as a sculptural figure in the landscape.

But these are small details, and not enough to distract from my enjoyment of the piece. The bigger picture is that Rear View is a cleverly constructed piece that delivers a feast for the eyes and the ears, and a clever reflection on the constant play between perception, memory and imagination that informs all our journeying through life. It invites us to see familiar landscapes with new eyes, to reinvent the streets and sites we think we know. A major achievement for IOU, and a highlight of the outdoor arts programme for Brighton Festival 2018.