There is, I sincerely believe, a very clever concept at the heart of Vanishing. Two women, from thousands of miles and five decades apart, are suddenly drawn into an ethereal space where objects are represented by abstract blocks and memories take a physical form. The two share no common language, yet each has a tale to tell. So, as the programme blurb asks us, “How do we understand a foreign story through spaces and objects?” The answer is… I didn’t.

In a 1960s American diner, and speaking in English, a character known only as [B] is busy serving coffee and snacks. The phone rings. It’s [A] on the other end, speaking mainly Chinese, calling from present-day Hong Kong. Somehow, [A] and [B] “vanish” from their own worlds to unite in a mysterious void, surrounded by giant toy blocks with pictures of familiar objects on their faces. And when they pick up the phone again, an impersonal voice urges them to make a choice…

Up to this point, it could be the set-up for an interesting episode of Doctor Who. Unfortunately, what comes next is confusing: a mash-up of videos, monologues and often-distracting sound, the last of those played live on an old-school keyboard from the back of the room. At times it feels weird for weirdness’s sake, while at other times it seemed there was a meaning I could nearly grasp but which ultimately eluded me.

Amidst it all, Jessica Reed as [B] tells a powerful story about what’s brought her to the diner – an all-American tale of hope, opportunity and disappointment. Reed is an excellent actor and, despite the constant interruptions around her, invoked both compassion and understanding as she made her next choice in life. As [A], Xiner Lan is also trying to tell us something, with a few phrases in English but mostly in her character’s own tongue. I’m guessing her story somehow mirrors [B]’s, but that is just a guess – the clues I picked up from the videos and her emotion weren’t enough to bridge the linguistic gap.

There were many people in the audience who seemed to understand both characters and I can readily believe that, if you’re bilingual, you’ll have a very different experience of this play. And there’d be nothing wrong with a show that targets this specific community – but that doesn’t seem to be what In-Version Ensemble set out to do. The programme notes assert that “language is significant for communication yet insignificant for connection”; I have to disagree, because I couldn’t connect with [A] at all.

Vanishing has admirable ambition, but it packs in too many experiments. The multimedia elements are distracting more than cohesive, and the intriguing conceptual world it’s set in remains relatively unexplored. Most of all, I think they’ve badly overestimated our ability to empathise with a story we can’t understand. Still, there’s an exciting show to be made around these ideas – and I believe, in time, they’ll find it.