The latest from audiovisual experimenters Sound and Fury lures audiences into the strange, rarefied world of a top-secret submarine mission. Steve Wright’s our man at the periscope.

As soon as you arrive you feel you’re in another world. And you realise how tough it must be to survive in those conditions. 120 men sharing a space the size of a semi-detached home, down there without daylight or contact with loved ones, for weeks at a time.”

The speaker is Dan Jones, Bristol-hailing composer, sound artist and one third of acclaimed theatre company Sound and Fury. And, as you might have guessed, he’s talking about life on board a submarine. Because…? Research for their latest piece has taken Dan and co on board some of the Navy’s top-secret nuclear subs.

Sound and Fury (Dan and fellow Bristol boys Mark and Tom Espiner) have created some inspired pieces of ‘immersive theatre’ - multi-sensory shows that audiences experience in ways far outstripping conventional sit-down theatre. Early pieces ‘War Music’ and ‘The Watery Part of the World’ were both staged in total darkness. Follow-up ‘Ether Frolics’ led audiences on a walkabout exploration into the woozy state of anaesthesia.

SaF’s latest, ‘Kursk’, is a promenade performance, with audiences roaming the meticulously reproduced interior of a British nuclear submarine. It’s inspired by the Kursk disaster of 2000, when a Russian submarine suffered a huge explosion that sent it to the seabed. Sound and Fury’s show takes place inside a British submarine (hypothetically) patrolling the same Barents Sea waters. On hearing the Kursk’s distress signals, the British crew find themselves with a painful dilemma: answer them - thus exposing their own covert surveillance, a revelation with potentially incendiary geopolitical consequences - or leave the submariners to their terrible fate?

If that’s the moral quandary that ignites the play’s later stages, much of the piece - scripted by renowned playwright Bryony Lavery - centres on the strange rolling rhythm of danger and routine that comprises life underwater. The crew drill, sleep, eat, long for word from home and silently shadow their target. Until the tragic event and its resultant soul-searching (which divides the crew, with the pressures of their existence finally taking their toll), their lives are at once extraordinary and mundane.

Designer Jon Bausor’s set replicates the dimensions inside a sub’s control room, mess and captain’s cabin. “Audiences have complete access - they can choose their own camera angle, and are inches from the actors,” Dan explains. “We were nervous about that proximity, but the actors thrive on it. A submarine is an incredibly crowded environment, and it creates a sense of claustrophobia - without ever confining audiences uncomfortably.”

Sound and Fury are driven, says Dan, to “explore psychological dilemmas in a big, epic backdrop”. And the Kursk story fitted that blueprint. “The tragedy captured the world’s imagination. To know that there were these men alive down there, and to live through their final helpless moments, left some indelible marks on people.”

The company have researched daily life on board a sub. “Even surviving day to day, without crises, is an act of bravery. In that tiny space they have to carry out one of the most important jobs in maintaining world peace. We gradually discovered that whilst the Cold War is nominally finished, the spying games continue beneath the waves. It’s a hidden war - without attacks, perhaps, but with constant surveillance and secrecy. And the way you hide and see under the waves is using sound, so there’s no more ideal setting for a theatre company that uses sound as we do.”

Dan himself has serious sound design pedigree, having produced scores for films including ‘Shadow of the Vampire’ and 2004’s ‘Max’, for which he received an Ivor Novello Award. “The sound in this piece is like another actor - often standing in for the 115 actors who aren’t on board. On the other hand, there’s a much more poetic, immersive nature to the sound as well - about the sea, as both home and enemy.”

Research also included interviews with naval psychologists about the peculiar stresses and strains of life in a tiny pressurised container, hundreds of leagues under the sea. The evening is given rhythm by the crew’s alternating spells on and off watch, with orderly work patterns interspersed with moments of alarm and boisterousness.

“No one’s ever truly off-duty in an environment like that, but when you’re off-watch, the release of pressure from such hostile conditions is palpable. It’s the contrast between those two moods that really tells the story of how these guys survive. We have a lot of fun on stage.” KURSK IS AT BRISTOL OLD VIC STUDIO FROM FRI 12-SAT 20 MAR. SEE THEATRE DIARY FFI.