ALTHOUGH the performance officially starts at 7.45pm in The Studio, please be advised that the Bureau Of Surrealist Research – Dali, Bunuel, Breton, Magritte et al – will be in the foyer from 5.30pm onwards.

Your involvement, dear audience member, will start as soon as you encounter York company Belt Up’s cast of surrealists: maybe Chris White’s Magritte will ask you to put felt-tip pen to paper, blindfolded, or James Wilkes’s meticulously mad Dali will seek your assistance in drawing up a list.

As Marcus Emerton’s Andre Breton, founder of the Paris group of surrealists, explains from the foyer stairs, Lorca Is Dead is a work in constant development, so much so that each performance will be different from the last.

Writer-director Dominic J Allen has a script in place, a structure around which his cast of eight tells the story of the life and brutal death of Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, their fellow avant artist, while revealing plenty about their own surrealist credos.

The play progresses from the grotesque comedy of the theatre of the absurd – at present a little too desperate in style – to a more serious paean to the humanity of these in-fighting creative matadors. The comedy will kick on, and the rising tide of drama already knocks you over, aided by Alexander Wright’s subtle piano compositions.

After each show, the audience can contribute to a talkback discussion that will then feed the next day’s further innovations in the script, put to the test in open rehearsals.

This is hard-working, experimental theatre, where company and audience alike will benefit from the more work they each put in, as the Edinburgh Fringe will discover this summer.

Lorca Is Dead Or A Brief History Of Surrealism, Belt Up Theatre, The Studio, York Theatre Royal, tonight at 7.45pm.