Towards the end of Rebecca Watson’s debut novel, Little Scratch, the unnamed heroine lies next to her sleeping boyfriend and finds herself “alone with my head”. Watson’s great achievement is that the preceding 200 pages capture that exact experience, giving us an unfiltered day in the life of her protagonist’s mind in first-person, present-tense prose scattered across the page. It asks us to keep up with a flood of feelings and concurrent thought processes, text messages and motor skills in a triumph of typesetting. It is a dazzling read, but how might this work on stage? You could imagine Eve Ponsonby, who stands before us, delivering a breakneck, hour-long monologue. But Katie Mitchell’s production in this theatre’s studio space adds three actors alongside her to deliver Miriam Battye’s faithful adaptation, although “arrangement” perhaps does better justice to this contrapuntal treatment of the text, which has a musical precision. Words are sent rippling up and down the line of actors, overlapping, chiming or bringing chilled silence. The stage is dressed as if for a radio recording. Wearing dark clothes, the quartet create sound effects with brushes, crisp packets and pints of water, often for comical accompaniment to the woman’s hungover Friday. But the story works on several levels and, within a minute, can draw both wry humour and gnawing horror from office life, and find weary familiarity and startling surprise in everyday routines. Among the administrative tasks, cost centre codes and cups of tea are conscious constants: the memory of her rape, the urge to self-harm, and the comfort of – and desire for – her boyfriend, “my him”. She rehearses telling him about her trauma but fears it would engulf their relationship. Her creativity, too, has been silenced as she cannot continue writing her novel, bringing underlying sadness to the bursts of witty wordplay in her thoughts. The presence of four performers risks diluting the stark aloneness and alienation you sense from the novel, and there is something a little too neat about how easily you fall into the quartet’s rhythms whereas the book’s word arrangements bring disorientation with each turn of the page. But these four actors, staring dead ahead in a line, deftly conjure the commute, queues and cubicles of daily life and, alongside the quoted statistics of workplace rape and harrassment, suggest the inner torment of multiple lives around the protagonist. Their eyes are fixed on us, and we feel the gaze of men on the woman, in a similar manner to Mitchell’s Ophelias Zimmer. The play does not assign different emotions to the actors – this isn’t some riff on Pixar’s Inside Out – though Ragevan Vasan is superbly stressy and Morónkẹ́ Akinọlá particularly strong at comedy. Eleanor Henderson catches just the right tone in brief phone messages as the protagonist’s mother, as well as a dissatisfied restaurant reviewer on Tripadvisor. Ponsonby is superbly nuanced, whether in fragility or fury. The quartet join in a humorous chorus of disapproval to discover “prawn chowder!” on the office menu, and later their voices swell to create a panic attack bolstered by Melanie Wilson’s sound score. Played without an interval, these 100 minutes don’t quite match the propulsion of the novel, but the staging finds its own careful balance of airy exuberance and intense anger, and it carries the same lingering power.