“I know this isn’t for everyone,” says performer Daniel Goldman, as he wraps up his end-of-show spiel. He’s right about that – and for the first fifteen minutes, it honestly wasn’t for me. Self-consciously muted, achingly meta, flirting with pretension, I thought. But then he got to the business end of Sergio Blanco’s script, and suddenly everything changed.

The “divine invention” of the title is love, and this show is about love in many forms – romantic, familial, altruistic. But it’s a show, also, about a darker kind of passion: the type that drives victims to embrace their abusers, or failing lovers to end their own lives. It’s a story told with confidence and occasional humour, but it goes to some deeply troubling places, all the same.

It’s delivered as a series of 30 short chapters, read aloud more than they’re acted out, by a man sitting casually at a desk on the stage. It’s an autofictional work – meaning it’s based on a truth from the author’s life, but shouldn’t be believed in its detail – which tells the story of its own composition, as Goldman portrays playwright Blanco pondering a commission to respond to Romeo and Juliet. Some chapters are imagined scenes from Blanco’s life, while others are miniature lectures on a vast range of topics, with the tortured paintings of Francis Bacon a particular recurring theme.

The performance is restrained – perhaps, at least initially, to a fault – with props and sound used sparingly, throwing focus completely on the words. You might wonder, in that case, what the benefit is of reading it aloud: denying us the chance to pause, to skim or linger, to read a densely-worded passage again. The effect was distancing at times – pushing me away from, rather than drawing me into, the narrative.

But that, I think, might be the point. The fictionalised Blanco we see on the stage is a survivor: a victim of something he half-welcomed at the time, but which any reasonable observer would class as abuse. The damage it’s caused is plain for us to see, in the story itself and in the dark pathways his study of love travels. Only with some distance can he tell such a harrowing tale – and can we in the audience accept it.

So, yes, this won’t be a show for everyone. It’s for those who’ll enjoy some classical-music appreciation followed by a discourse on anthropology, and who’ll nod approvingly at an appropriate use of the word “liminal”. Even if you’re that kind of person, at times it may demand your indulgence. But when it dares to approach such a difficult topic, I think that’s a privilege earned.