YORKSHIRE newcomers Sticks Theatre Company are showcasing their debut play with four days of performances and feedback from post-show discussions with a view to mounting a tour next year.

Artistic director Adam Sunderland has cut a swathe at the SJT in the past with his enchanting children’s theatre pieces and now he tackles a tale of an adult outsider with the same flair for memorable imagery and intriguing storytelling.

He moves into new territory by teaming up with physical theatre director David Glass and composer and musician Jenni Molloy for a 60-minute Fringe play devised by Sunderland and Glass from the true story of Richard Wallace, a chronic hoarder whose behaviour is endangering his own life, and Andy Honey, a landscape gardener who slowly gains his trust.

No two performances will ever be the same because Sticks Theatre’s study of loneliness, materialism and tolerance has no set script. Instead, Glass, in the role of Richard, and Leigh Symonds, as first a fireman and then as Andy, improvise their dialogue and movement to the live accompaniment of remarkable cellist and foley (sound effect) artist Molloy. When they break into a dance and Molloy starts playing jazz, she laughs with the joy of this impromptu moment.

It is the physical movement that defines this show: whereas Symonds’s fireman never looks at Glass’s Richard gardener, Andy shakes his hand and you instantly sense that no-one had done that for years in a Surrey village where Richard was shunned on his paper round and as he collected his trays of eggs for his two boiled eggs a day. That handshake is the defining image, the affirmation of “what great things can be achieved when humans connect” and friendship ensues.

That is a theme it shares with David Wood’s adaptation of Goodbye Mr Tom, seen at the Grand Opera House, in York, earlier this year.

Unlike that play, The Hoarder goes from being naturalistic to involving mime, balletic movement and constant improvisation, and most significantly of all, you have to imagine all the clutter that forced Richard to sleep in a chair for 15 years as he closed off from the world around him.

Theatre of the imagination is a powerful tool, particularly in Glass and Symonds’s intuitive, ad-libbed performance but The Hoarder would also have benefited from more factual clutter about the protagonist’s past to explain his psychological condition.

The Hoarder, Sticks Theatre Company, The McCarthy, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, tonight and tomorrow, 745pm, and Saturday, 2.45pm and 7.45pm. Box office: 01723 370541 or sjt.uk.com