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Adaptations from literature are thriving in theatre, but how do you stage Flann O’Brien’s ‘The Third Policeman’, a world where none of the rules holds good? Blue Raincoat takes its own route into the cult novel, writes PETER CRAWLEY.

EARLY IN 1940, Brian O’Nolan, a man of many pseudonyms, had an idea for “a crazy play”. It was a comic tale of murder, philosophy, molecular theory, eternal damnation and rampant bicycle crime. Sufficiently pleased with the plot, the writer began to pitch it in earnest in 1942, telling Hilton Edwards, then director of the Gate Theatre, about a piece of theatre involving “horrible concepts of time and death that would put plays like Berkeley Square into the halfpenny place”.