“We’re all here for a story.”

This is how Badgers begins, immediately positioning the audience not as spectators but as participants. Sitting intimately close to the low stage and at the performers’ eyeline, the audience is guided by storyteller and Badgers’ author Malaika Kegode, who makes the audience the main character, Meles. We share her ambitions, anxieties and even her uglier, selfish impulses - and just as she scrambles for any inkling of a story, we are kept on the edge of our seats, scrambling with her.

Meles, voice-acted by Hanora Kamen, is a mediocre podcast host, the disappointing predecessor of a famous and beloved journalist. After her mother becomes chronically ill, Melese is desperate to make her proud, and becomes increasingly obsessed with a story of a local young musician who went missing ten years prior. She befriends the old lady he was staying with who tells her of the magical metamorphosis linked with his disappearance. At first, Meles is difficult to like. Yet the production gradually influences us to understand her, connecting the complexities of guilt, love and grief.

The storytelling is abstract by design, relying heavily on the audience’s imagination.  We listen to pre-recorded inserts of the characters our narrator so vividly describes to us. It translates just as a bard singing his tales in front of a crowd and the story is thoughtfully fabricated in front of our eyes. Just three impressive actors create this world, recorded voices and live music build the atmosphere. The horror-esque feeling becomes particularly effective because of this eerie, picturesque quality. Similarly to reading, our wild and unpredictable imaginations are significantly more effective than what is being shown to you.

Beth Roberts’ and Joe Williams’ music is essential. Banjo, acoustic guitar and violin underpin almost the entire performance. Without this score, much of the production’s atmosphere would be lost. Similarly, Meles’ voice recordings are immersive, though at times so loud and shrill that they become slightly uncomfortable, perhaps deliberately, drawing us further into the unsettling case.

Most importantly, Badgers demonstrates how powerful theatre can be as a medium for storytelling. It takes an imaginative and open audience member to fully surrender to its strange nature, but if you do, you are taken somewhere magical, in events far removed from reality yet rawly human in theme.

You leave not simply having watched a story, but having been part of it, and eventually, you come out as yourself again.

Badgers is a Theatre Royal, Plymouth production in association with Bristol Old Vic.