There is one certainty for everyone attending the National Theatre’s new production of The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other: none of the cast will forget their lines. That’s not because the actors in question are peculiarly infallible. It’s because there are no lines.

Peter Handke’s experimental drama offers 90 minutes of wordless action on stage; 450 characters pass through a town square, but not one of them speaks. There is a script, but it consists of 30 pages of intricate instructions from the Austrian playwright (translated by Meredith Oakes) about the way the figures behave as they traverse the space. “It’s like the world’s longest stage direction, really,” says James Macdonald, who is directing this, the UK’s first professional production of the 1992 play.