The composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim has often been accused of entrancing the ear and the mind, but leaving the heart untroubled. Sam Buntrock’s stunning revival of Sondheim’s 1984 work, the first in the UK since its National Theatre premiere in 1990, brilliantly disproves that notion. The score’s lush melodies and chromatic feverishness sound ravishing under Caroline Humphris’s musical direction. And Buntrock’s production is so inventive and emotionally intense that it induces a state of sustained wonderment.

The show, with book by James Lapine, is inspired by Georges Seurat’s pointillist masterpiece A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. In the first act the painter, driven by a vision the artistic establishment derides, creates his characters from those he sees strolling in the park on Sunday, while his mistress, Dot, models for the painting’s foreground figure. George’s absorption in his work costs them their love when a pregnant Dot makes a pragmatic marriage and emigrates to America. Act II takes place 100 years later, with another George, Dot and George’s great-grandson, stuck in a creative rut making flashy laser installations for the New York art scene and struggling to find a connection with his past or his present.

The show, in itself an artwork, repeatedly draws parallels between art and life. Its wordplay is exquisite — Dot feels like a mere dot in George’s life; to find his way modern George needs to connect the dots — but far from feeling dramatically arid, such intricate details mimic the obsessive care with which George adds dabs of colour to his canvas.

Buntrock’s production thrillingly reflects this: David Farley’s white gallery set is a blank page for Timothy Bird’s jaw-dropping projected animation, in which the painting gradually takes shape around the actors. Yet the technological marvels never upstage the sensational flesh-and-blood performers. As the semi-detached Seurat, Daniel Evans shows us the painful psychological struggle underlying his neglect of Dot; and he is desperately moving as New York George, floundering amid all the questions his great-grandfather left unanswered.

Anna-Jane Casey not only dazzles as a strong, sensual Dot, but transforms, in the second act, into frail, elderly Marie, Dot’s daughter and George’s wise, roguish grandmother.

Insisting that the Seurat painting is their “family tree”, Marie voices the show’s most affecting theme — the transience of life, love and beauty, and art’s ability to immortalise them. “Art,” as one lyric has it, “isn’t easy”, and nor is this work; but it is infinitely rewarding.

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