The Silence of the Sea, Trafalgar Studios

Few productions give the sound designer absolute pride of place, but such is the presumably inevitable nature of a play called The Silence of the Sea that what isn't voiced counts every bit as much as what is. Gregory Clarke's aural landscape works overtime in a 95-minute piece (no interval) that couples speech with sustained silences, yes, but also with eerie ambient noises that suggest all manner of offstage activity complementing the brooding stillness on view. Engaging?

Up to a point, and the acting is impeccable throughout, but even the most expert sound cues can't forestall a gathering sense that much of the actual drama is happening elsewhere. 

Closing out this year's Donmar Trafalgar series (and, indeed, the young directors' initiative as a whole), Simon Evans's production is precisely, carefully wrought - so much so that every downward glance or protracted stare seems exactly calibrated to within an inch of its life. The result is an overarching self-seriousness that renders the evening more impressive as a theatrical exercise than as a fully alive and vibrant play. The doomy start, for instance, takes so long to get going that it's a relief when someone actually starts to talk: a little atmosphere can go a long way.

The source for Anthony Weigh's stage adaptation is the 1942 novella of the same name by Vercors, the Frenchman otherwise known as Jean Bruller whose pseudonymous book prompted a 1949 film adaptation by Jean-Pierre Melville and became a signature work of the French intellectual resistance. (The story goes that Vercors told Melville that he would burn the negative if he didn't like the screen version; as it happens, the novelist loved it.)

But the problem with the material is that it depends almost entirely on narrative accounts of situations or encounters that we are left to re-imagine or intuit for ourselves - the kind of thing that fiction, of course, can do well but that is tricky to accomplish on stage. Tennessee Williams, for instance, calls The Glass Menagerie a memory play but then goes on to enact afresh the events that plague the narrator Tom's every haunted hour.  

This play begins with many an abject, pained gaze from the largely wordless Young Woman (Simona Bitmaté, a dusky-eyed newcomer whose listening skills are destined to be honed to a fine art throughout the run), niece to the Older Man (a grizzled Finbar Lynch) whose provincial home is given over to an occupying German officer, Werner (Leo Bill, pictured above), who insists on being billeted upstairs. The German character has a name but his newfound housemates do not, as if to grant Everyperson status to these joint witnesses to an invasive force they come gradually to comprehend.  

What follows mixes the avuncular with the brutal, the casual with a deepening sense of a capacity for violence that exists between nations and between families, too. Weigh's writing grabs at images - a trapped fly, a scream, boots making their way across gravel - that are either directly fearful or promise further ill to come. And yet, the sea throughout exists in savagely contrapuntal silence, its undulations as steady as the political storm brewing beyond the confines of the trio whom we see before us.

As was true of The Promise at this same address in November (though less so with the ensuing Dance of Death), the acting is very fine across the board, and it's a pleasure to see both Lynch (pictured above left, in the foreground) and Bill in such close quarters, the latter fielding some momentous soliloquies with agitated aplomb. The more numerologically minded, by the way, may notice that we have now seen a third Donmar Trafalgar season of three plays, this season's line-up all containing casts of three. I don't know whether that's a good omen or not but on the evidence here, the sea will surely keep doing its thing, regardless.

• The Silence of the Sea at Donmar Trafalgar until 2 February