THE all-female Six Lips Theatre trio are on a year’s internship in the Basement at Bar Lane Studios after graduating from their theatre studies at York St John University.

Formed last April by actresses Anna Rose James and Roxanna Klimaszewska and director Hannah Wallace, the company is taking its biggest step so far with its re-imagining of Samuel Beckett’s Footfalls, a “flagship show” for what they call “immersive theatre”.

Such theatre is in essence an all-round experience in which the entire, windowless subterranean room becomes the world of the play, the seating placed among the scrunched-up maps, flower petals, flies, paint blotches, cotton wool, grubby carpets and dust sheets. Appropriately, your clumsy reviewer stumbled into a wooden box en route to his chair.

Your immersion, or indeed submersion, is, however, strictly on their terms: you are invited in for precisely one hour only, whereupon the usher does indeed usher you out – and the relationship is still very much one of audience watching performers.

This Six Lips philosophy will need further refining for greater clarity, a feeling enhanced by the distancing device of Footfalls being one of the notoriously obfuscating Beckett’s most ambiguous pieces.

It is the one where, lit by a floor lamp at each end, the troubled, gaunt May (James) compulsively paces nine steps back and forth, trying to make sense of “it”, whatever “it” is, as the Voice (Klimaszewska) in the darkest, farthest corner answers her questions about mother and injections.

Even when performed on a loop to a soundtrack of running water and bell chimes, which lengthens the play from 20 minutes to an hour, it is ironically very difficult to discern what the muffled Voice is saying.

So far, the more conventional tools of costumes by Catherine Richards, clay make-up by Emily Pease and set by Jess Mather have surpassed the performance side of the show. It is early days yet; put it down to experience, or rather, the lack of it, as Six Lips are full of ideas and possibilities that will benefit from sharper focus.

Shorter but better realised is the film that follows, made by the company at a York cemetery and disused building with Paul Richardson of Parashoot Films as an exploration of the meaning of Beckett’s play. It is just as ambiguous but makes more sense!

Samuel Beckett’s Footfalls, Six Lips Theatre, The Basement at Bar Lane Studios, York, until Saturday; “immersive performances” at 7pm. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk