GOLEM is a co-production between the innovative 1927 company, the Salzburg Festival, Théâtre de la Ville, Paris, and the Young Vic Theatre, London, but has its roots in Harrogate Theatre.

Following a West End run and international tour that took in China and Australia and ended up at the Lincoln Centre, New York, writer-director Suzanne Andrade's show returns in full bloom tomorrow to Harrogate, where it had begun life as a work-in-development in July 2014 after she met Harrogate Theatre's programmer of that time, Kevin Jamieson, at the Edinburgh Fringe.

"Harrogate let us 'scratch' part of the show, which gave us a deadline, but with the pressure off, so we did it in a very rough form with me sometimes going into the audience with a microphone to say 'at this point, this will happen'," she recalls.

The 1927 company became artists in residence at the Young Vic, Suzanne received a young director's award from the Salzburg Festival and an international production was born in a form reminiscent of a giant graphic novel bursting into life.

Golem is a dark, fantastical tale of an extraordinary ordinary man, Robert Robertson, whose life is irrevocably disrupted when he buys a golem: a creature that will improve the efficiency of his daily affairs. After Robert upgrades to Golem 2.0, Andrade's dystopian satirical fable asks what happens when man is no longer in control of machine in our tech-obsessed times.

Live music and performance combines with film, animation and design by Paul Barritt in a show presented by five multi role-playing actor-musicians. "They have to interact with the animation and the film, and the film is never just a backdrop," says Suzanne. "The performers couldn't be on stage without the animation and vice versa, so it's a very challenging show for the actors with a very intricate choreography involved. We wanted to overload the stage with a very dense multi-media experience to reflect our 21st century...until everything is slowly stripped away to one colour, one person."

Analysing the relationship between man and machine, Suzanne says: Technology seems to be this thing that we willingly open up to in our life, but we've been so uncritical, we're like children, just jumping in excitedly but not questioning it enough.

"So we very much focus on the dangerous side of it in Golem because the story starts to tell itself at some point, heading towards a dystopian conclusion. Essentially our technologies are neutral, but our feeling in this show is that we try to make technology do what we want to do, to be 'naughty' with it, but constantly we come up against what it wants us to do.

"So it's about how we use it, and it's now moving very quickly, it's moving ahead and we're always having to chase it. But if you look at what technology can do for us, if we look at it in a utopian way, technology can do minor roles, leaving us to do other things, like in the community and in social care, and that's what we do well when I think of us in a positive way, but it's now down on its knees in our society."

1927 present Golem at Harrogate Theatre, tomorrow until Saturday, 7.30pm and 2.30pm Saturday matinee. Box office: 01423 502116 or at harrogatetheatre.co.uk

Did you know?

1927 take their name from a significant year in the world of cinema.

"We didn't have a name for a while," recalls writer-difrector Suzanne Andrade. "It was just Paul Barritt and I working under our names, but we liked the idea of a date for a name and as our aesthetic was very film-inspired, and the first talkie was The jazz Singer in 1927, we called the company 1927."