Alice is a profoundly sincere and deeply-researched work – not quite a play, more a collaborative experiment, and an invitation to enter someone else’s world. It documents the experience of voice-hearers: the people who, as a result of childhood trauma, live with the sound of vocalised commentary constantly in their heads. Video testimonials from real-life voice-hearers form the most moving and impactful component of the show, but the story’s mainly told through the fictional Alice, played on stage by Louisa Delaluz.

As Alice, Delaluz is restless and distracted, seemingly as chaotic as the messy flat we’ve found her in. She’s preparing for a party – for her birthday, it turns out – but she quickly gets distracted onto painting, sloshing on the pigment in bold and formless strokes. At first she seems to be talking to someone else, but when we watch the scene a second time we learn that she’s responding to a cacophony of voices in her mind. Some of them seem to give good advice, but most are self-destructive… and one is very disturbing indeed.

A few minutes in, we’re invited to don headphones so that we, too, can know what it’s like to hear voices inside our heads. It’s an effective technique, though the practicalities are awkward: it takes a while to get set up with the technology, and the headphones tend to block out the lines being delivered from the stage. Once we’ve sampled the experience, they dispense with the headphones and play the voices over the speakers instead – but the change in delivery took me out of the moment, and I wonder whether the technical complexity is overall worthwhile.

Some further creative choices are distancing too. Alice is keen to remind us that it is a play, with actors who aren’t in the scene sitting to the side of the stage and occasional instructions called out to the tech box. The documentary videos, meanwhile, are played through twice – and while the intervening scenes lend them additional context, the repeat still leaves a sense of confusion. There’s a limit to how many unfamiliar concepts you can wrap your brain around, and a more natural style of storytelling might help the core message land more firmly.

Although the show invites compassion, it doesn’t negate uncomfortable truths: a second character, who’s there to fit a smart-meter, gives us the eyes to see just how alarming Alice’s behaviour must seem. But by the end, we understand all too well the distressing history that’s made her that way, and how closely that story mirrors the harrowing stories we’ve heard from real life. This is a show that takes some processing, but the disorder is there for a purpose. And if their mission is to help us understand, then it triumphantly meets that goal.