In a time where the pressure is on to get bums on seats and send an audience home smiling, this dark and demanding work by Irish playwright Enda Walsh feels like theatre’s equivalent of the Yurchenko Double Pike.

You get extra marks for daring to do it.

A cheerless waiting room: a row of hard plastic chairs, a pot plant, a radio, video surveillance cameras in pods. A digital board displays a number.

A woman (Phaedra Nicolaidis), later named as Isla, is waiting. Why, or for what we don’t know. For how long only becomes apparent later.

Phaedra Nicolaidis and Jack Angwin in Empress Theatre’s Arlington. Photo © Phil Erbacher

Beyond the waiting room – elsewhere in the city but adjacent in this staging designed by Kate Beere – sits an operative (Jack Angwin) in a control room. He’s new to the job, nervous and not entirely across the technology (and there’s a lot of it; multiple monitors, arrays of blinking lights). It’s his job, it appears, to coax Isla into telling stories, which he records and creates a live underscore for. She seems to have the ability to have her dreams project externally.

Isla...