or his first season in charge of the Unicorn, Justin Audibert spun a brilliant web of tales featuring the spider Anansi. After that arachnid trickster comes a bee story, similarly told by a trio of actors nimbly sharing the role of narrator. Written by German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig and translated by David Tushingham, The Bee in Me is aimed at audiences over eight and isn’t as twee as that title may suggest. It can feel as stark and austere as its opening image: a single bed with white sheets but no one tucked into it. This, we are told, is where you sleep – and the show proceeds to use the second-person voice, with its nameless 10-year-old hero remaining conspicuously absent as we hear about a day in their life. As such, the audience are encouraged to imagine themselves experiencing the child’s life of neglect. But the narrators (Akshay Sharan, Emily Burnett and James Russell-Morley) also capture the internal dialogue of a young person navigating a precarious life. With parents who switch between absent and abusive, the child escapes into entwined dreamworlds: approaching everyday scenarios as if they are levels in a computer game; and imagining themselves as a bee, buzzing away from this smoke-stained flat, its dizzy flight mimicked by Jon McLeod’s cascading electronic score. Rachel Bagshaw’s production excels at abruptly contrasting these warm fantasies with harsh reality. One minute, the lights on the walls of Khadija Raza’s set glow to represent nectar; the next, it is a cold school morning and the child is late, dressed in dirty uniform and anxiously exiting the flat, making video game-style split-second decisions to bypass a drunkenly slumbering father. You’d expect more humour from a kinetic episode where the bee is swatted about a classroom, or when the child makes a canny escape from a pair of bullying brothers, but there is precious little levity. How could there be when the stakes are this high? When resilience and imagination are what you rely on; when the family fridge has beer but no food; when your day is defined by cold, hunger and fear; and when going to bed isn’t a refuge. Bursting with a final crescendo of hope, this is a demanding and often upsetting hour but essential too.