FRANZ KAFKA’S deceptively straightforward style of writing forces readers to search for deeper meaning. It’s an approach that CVIVarts has sought to emulate in this debut production, an adaptation of his 1922 short story A Hunger Artist, which follows the eponymous protagonist (Henry Petch) from his first to his 40th day of starvation at a circus.

He’s only rarely given his own voice, with his warder (Richard Koslowsky) and the narrator (director Carrieanne Vivianette) interpreting the motivations behind his act.

His unspoken frustrations and anger are instead conveyed through physical movement, choreographed by Phil Sanger, with repeated poses losing their vigour as his act progresses and public interest wanes.

Framed within a small cage demarcated by chalk lines, his body becomes grimed in water and straw as he drags himself through the motions and winds up a clock.

Time is elsewhere marked on a sandwich board by the increasingly disinterested warder, who at one point throws an apple core into the cage.

In contrast, the narrator grows more impassioned as the days pass. She seems to take strength from the artist’s exhaustion, with her neutral tone gaining in disdain and her head jerking as she spits out insults. “Tiny little thing! Pitiful thing!” she exclaims.

This shift in tone doesn’t correlate with the imposition of a prescribed meaning about the play’s intentions.

Through the use of absurdist humour, co-writers Vivianette and Neil Rathmell maintain the source material’s ambiguous minimalism, elsewhere reflected in the near empty stage and Duncan Evans’s sparse sound design, to ask questions of the audience.

Playing at The Carriageworks, Leeds, on March 21, box office: carriageworkstheatre.co.uk