Housing, especially here in the south east, is currently a national obsession. The premise of The House Project, which draws together sociological and economic research about housing use in Brighton with drama, feels not only timely but almost pathologically compelling. An estate agents’ tour of the sort of grand old villa in Brighton that these days would likely be fractured into bedsit living pods appeals to all the vicarious pleasures of shopping through property porn.

This framing device has been well thought through and developed: we are greeted outside the house by two deliciously smarmy estate agents in a front yard bristling with sale boards that seem to have wildly proliferated like the visible symptoms of a national epidemic. They expertly divide and and regroup the audience, taking us on two intertwining tours of the property, taking in six different performance spaces and guided by a map on the back of our programmes which outlines the year and character we will be watching.

It’s a clever device to set the scenes across time periods, giving us the chance to meet the house’s inhabitants in the 70s, 90s and the present day, and opening up space for commentary about changes in the ways houses are used by families, and also for an effective jigsaw-like story of family history for us to piece together. The scenes are structured as long form improvisations, or perhaps they have only been developed that way. In any case we encounter what seem only to be sections of interactions before being moved on by our estate agent guides: this effectively gives the atmospheric illusion of ghosts of action running continuously through the house, of which we glimpse only parts. However it also means that scenes feel very loose and formless: there is a sense of performers trying to hit lines of exposition but as naturalism it feels overextended and flabby: I watched a long scene of two characters sleeping in bed and at times the audience are left with not enough to go on or to hold us. Considering the amount of time we spend with each character – at least 10 minutes or so in every scene – there is far more we could have discovered about them to add depth and interest as individuals beyond the immediate story we are being invited to look at. The piece would have benefited from working with a writer.

The show has been created by the Brighton Laboratory, a Continuing Professional Development hub for local theatre makers to work together, and its form bears the hallmarks of a process-led exploration. There are many different languages at play here – some more effectively used than others – including dramatic improvisation, dance, installation (a nice room of dolls houses menacing and tripping up the young mother in the attic rooms, though hampered by tricky sight lines), some thoughtful use of technology (with live-feed camera work helping to magnify some of the very understated TV-style acting) and, unexpectedly, absurdist direct address from a maid character who asks us to consider the first world problems of housing (and other issues) in the UK. I enjoyed the thoughtfulness that had gone into the ideas behind the production but there is more work needed still to develop the audience’s journey through these different languages and spaces, and to create scenes of greater depth and complexity.