If there is a crisis in the reviewing of British theatre it is this. It seems impossible that a critic can go to press saying, ‘I loved it; it was amazing; you really have to see it, because I was so involved and delighted that my faculties of analysis were overcome and I surfed a wave of joy through the white waters of all that is theatre’.

I went to see ‘Roberto Zucco’ last night at Chapter; Bernard-Marie Koltes’ play about the non-fictional serial killer. I loved it; it was amazing you really have to see it, because I was so involved and delighted that my faculties of analysis were overcome and I surfed a wave of joy through the white waters of all that is theatre. Having openly admitted this, I am faced with the problem of trying to describe my experience without denying you the constantly-unfolding elements of surprise which propel it. The tools, with which this experience has been assembled by Mathilde Lopez, are carefully crafted, both in their precision and in the limits built around on their waywardness. Actors get to act, and also they get to be that Brechtian ideal, real people being actors. Thanks to the performers energy and considerable personal warmth, we also get to feel like we are being a real audience.

And surprisingly, amid all the invention and lapses into farce and comic-book, we still get to commune with a major play with serious ambitions. Koltes painted a society twisted by its coping strategies, for whose individuals the killer’s knife represents some sort of blessed relief. His victims, like the audience, seem to be craving to find out what happens next. Early on in the play, we begin to see the murderer as possessed of a saintly calmness in a world that struggles to find time to breathe.

In the adoption of British vernacular speech, we may lose something of a European perspective. I am not a fan of Martin Crimp, and suspect his translation abandoned the attempt to portray the French tolerance of murder under extreme mental turmoil. Koltes paints Zucco as the perpetrator of crimes passionnels against society itself. France can also revere fictional villains like Fantomas, whose crimes were permeated with such brio as to enter the realms of art. We get a whiff of this, but Lopez takes a route emphasising the domestic and the everyday, rather than the metaphysical and surreal, but the play is certainly strong enough to take it, and it works.

Much acting talent is on display, both in Adam Redmore’s Zucco, who walks a tightrope between the placid and the chilling, and in his fellow cast members who play a large variety of hilarious victims and inept policemen with Herculean relish. There is also a contribution from, well, other areas too.

If I have missed anything here, I refuse to apologise on the premise that, at the time, I was having too much fun. This production will be a magnet for awards. Take a bottle of water and apply deodorant. It’s hot in there.