As we settle into place for Tom Hiccup’s Well, we find ourselves transported to a bucolic scene: bathed in green light, birdsong in the background, a wicker basket resting prettily on a young woman’s arm. The woman herself is provincially charming too, sitting on the edge of the stage and leaning into the audience as she opens her tale. But the story we’re going to hear is anything but wholesome – and hints that these ancient woodlands host forces we don’t understand.

Charlotte Ball’s script is hugely evocative, drawing us into the heart of a village high in the hills of Derbyshire sometime in the early 1800s. The well of the title is long-abandoned, spoken of half-seriously as the home of a mysterious elf who has the power to make humans hiccup. When the strong-hearted but naïve Joanna has a run-in with landowner Wilkins, the latter is foolish enough to dismiss the well’s rumoured power. You can probably guess how badly this will end.

The solo performer, Ellie Ball, has almost supernatural power of her own. Though it’s always the storyteller’s voice we’re hearing, the characters she describes come vividly to life: the dissolute Wilkins is particularly vivid, played not as a stereotypical cad but as a man who’s simply too used to getting his own way. Sparing use of props (brought on in that wicker basket) helps complete the image, while shifts in mood and tone at times make that image a dark one. Such is the completeness of the immersion, at one point I found myself unnervingly convinced that the basket contained a human head.

The style is intentionally folkloric rather than gothic, but still, I’d have liked the script to set the creepiness dial a little higher. There’s a contradiction to be managed here: our life experience tells us that a hiccup is a trivial thing, maybe even comic. The tension hangs on us believing that it’s more than that – a freakish loss of control over your own body – and although the narrative does touch on that idea, it’s a sideline which isn’t explored fully. The main story would make just as much sense if it was, say, Tom Hangman’s Well, which suggests the core concept isn’t quite established at the heart of the plot.

But the story does have its grisly moments – and the cocksure villain’s inevitable comeuppance is satisfyingly visceral, with Ball’s striking physical performance adding greatly to the moment of vengeance. In the end this is no rural idyll, but it’s a rustic tale nonetheless, which truly feels like it could have evolved across generations. Drink deeply… if you dare.