The late Romanian poet, playwright and politician Marin Sorescu’s surrealist trilogy gets a boisterous treatment from Brighton experimental company Squall + Frenzy in this bleak new adaptation.

First published after the collapse of dictator Ceausescu’s regime, Thirst Of The Salt Mountain tells the story of three characters yearning for impossible escape from their surroundings and, ultimately, themselves.

Weaving existential dread with biblical imagery, we get an even stranger twist on the fish-swallowed man (Jonah), a dying man leaving the flooded earth just as his daughter gives birth (The Matrix) and a preacher building his own cathedral (The Verger).

Each presents a Dante-esque multi-layered descent into despair, performed savagely with all the gurning, screaming and lolloping you’d imagine from physical theatre, though with the same drawbacks that entails.

Spare yet inventive direction and stage/sound design successfully conjure necessary symbolism and visual boldness; Conor Baum is likewise striking as our increasingly deranged fisherman Jonah.

Still, nearly two hours in, this difficult original text feels like a chore when you get line after line shouted for effect and bodies physically weakened by existential burden.

Of course, that may be the point, though you can’t escape the feeling of leaving, exhausted for the wrong reasons.

Three stars