Enda Walsh wrote his Orwellian tale of social isolation before the pandemic rendered such stories cliché. Adapting Arlington for a post-covid audience, then, required a feat of platitude-bursting imagination that directors Lucy Ireland and Jim Manganello achieve by exhausting the potentialities of theatre. Walsh’s guiding themes (defiant hope and unrequited love) are poignant, his dialogue casually poetic, yet this adaptation excels in its staging, sound and lighting.

Arlington is the high-rise building in which our protagonist, Isla, is trapped. Fittingly, the stage sits five feet from the ground and is sparsely set but for three chairs upholstered in hospital-blue plastic and a bundle of discarded clothes. At floor level, Isla’s supervisor (the requisite Big Brother figure) sits at a security desk stacked with box televisions that screen various angles of the stage back to him and the audience in live time.

The music, composed by Cat Myers, is an accelerating electro-pulse that reflects the characters’ uneasy anticipation of a release that might never come. It perfectly soundtracks Jack Anderson’s contorted contemporary dance in the middle act, which takes the play closer to performance art without losing any narrative momentum. Racing LEDs circle the border of the stage as if goading him to see what’s beyond: to see if freedom is anything more than an open window and the rush of air down to blood-stained pavements. With a more straightforward production, Arlington’s hopeful resolution might seem far-fetched, but in this adaptation the hope seems radically well earnt.

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, Thursday 6–Saturday 8 November; reviewed at Tron Theatre, Glasgow; main picture: Brian Hartley.