The 27 cast members play maybe 400 characters but don’t have a single line to learn. The translator, which is what Meredith Oakes is weirdly credited as being, doesn’t have to change one word from German into English because there’s not one word to change. Peter Handke’s 90-minute play is about people-watching but never about people-hearing. Its subject is the world as it might be witnessed by you and me as we sit and speculate about the lives of those silently ambling, scurrying, strutting or just walking past us.

Much of this is as banal as the random bustle in a Lowry painting. Businessmen, secretaries, street cleaners, joggers, old women with shopping trolleys, scampering schoolchildren, hikers, tourists, a bag lady with a supermarket cart, a wedding party, a nun, a spiv, firemen, cops, a boy who tries to keep on swaggering after his skateboard has hit him in the groin, even a plane crew complete with uniforms and wheeled suitcases: many people crisscross a square consisting of unpainted concrete buildings, among them an Orthodox church and a severe rectangle rather like the Holocaust memorial in Vienna. But few notice each other and, though they very occasionally touch, none communicates in speech.

It’s hard to invent or imagine scenarios or stories in which these cursorily spotted people feature. But Handke and James Macdonald, his adroit British director, sometimes inject suggestive or eccentric moments into the dumbshow. A man runs out of a building in his underpants, holding his trousers. One woman biffs another on the head with a handbag, and the victim then loses her own handbag to a hoody. Successive lines of old men, some sporting the berets and medals that suggest a trip to the Cenotaph, troop through. Soldiers with machineguns run in, as at Fallujah. A maniac appears holding a giant puppet, drops dead and is removed by paramedics. There’s a desultory fight. A coffin comes and goes.

Handke conceived the play in a piazza near Trieste. But did someone sneak hallucinogens into his wine? Fantasy figures appear among the hurly-burly: Tarzan, Chaplin, Puss in Boots, Mozart’s Papageno, an Old Testament prophet, a gowned figure I thought was Oedipus until he regained his sight and kicked a girl in the bottom. But only once do things seem significant rather than strange; and that’s when the odd offstage sound (birds, bells, traffic) escalates into an unholy hubbub that seems to bode the arrival of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

The people stop, shake, cluster in alarm. Crisis has brought them together, as perhaps one day it will us. But the moment passes and everyday offhandedness reasserts itself, leaving me with a mix of feelings. Yes, this is an unusual, often striking, sometimes funny piece. Yes, it sent me from the theatre looking harder at the silent passers-by. But couldn’t Handke have cut a score or so characters and moments – or at least explored them a bit more deeply?

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