In a delightful if arcane touch, the cover design for the published text of Adriano Shaplin’s play is by the artist and musician Peter Blegvad, formerly the cartoonist behind a strip entitled Leviathan... Hobbes, Leviathan, geddit? In fact, this is possibly the most delightful thing about the enterprise, though far from the most arcane. Shaplin came to prominence writing relatively brief, absolutely intense plays for his American company The Riot Group. Now, as the first Royal Shakespeare Company/University of Warwick International Playwright in Residence, his work has expanded to fill the space available.

And my God, but there is a lot of space: an RSC cast of 15, a reconfiguration of this Victorian music hall into a mini-Swan Theatre with action taking place on four levels of stage, up the central aisle and in the gallery, and a play about... well... lots. The central strand is the contention in the 1660s between the then ageing Hobbes and the “Gresham divines” (subsequently the Royal Society), principally Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke, over whether the true path to knowledge lay through pure reason or observation and experimentation. It thus takes in science, theology, political philosophy (the play is set in the latter part of the English Commonwealth and the early years of the Restoration), and so on and so forth.