What, you can’t help but wonder about half way through what is an extremely slow 70 minutes, made Ruth Wilson agree to star in this oddly unpleasant revival of a 1930 Jean Cocteau monodrama?

Granted, she and the production’s extravagantly fêted director Ivo van Hove have history: she was an indelible Hedda Gabler in his poised, blistering Ibsen revival at the National in 2016. The piece itself – a monologue in which an unnamed woman has a final conversation with her ex-lover on the eve of his wedding to someone else – has been frequently adapted, including particularly successfully as the one act 1958 Poulenc opera La Voix Humaine. And Van Hove is a titan of coolly showy European theatre, although his reputation has been exceeding him for a while: his 2017 adaptation of the Visconti film Obsession starring Jude Law was agonisingly dreary.

This bewilderingly misjudged show, stripped back almost to the point of abstraction, is pretty dreary too, through no fault of Wilson’s. She’s in an empty apartment visible, Rear Window-style, through a large glass balcony door on an otherwise blank set, on the phone to her ex, who has left her for reasons that remain unclear.

Over the course of an evening during which we never hear his voice she adopts a variety of guises – the giggly, in-control former lover reassuring him everything is fine; the vulnerable little girl who admits she can’t sleep without pills; the woman so destroyed by his absence she spends five minutes with her face crumpled against the wall to Radiohead’s How to Disappear Completely (van Hove’s love for loudly signposting his productions with pop music is getting a bit much).

She nurses his shoes against her chest; she balances the phone on her face as though to drink in his voice; she scribbles a sweetly pathetic sign, Come Home, and sticks it to the window. She squeezes out every detail she can, yet the production’s calculated low-key naturalism works against her: for a production that casts the audience as voyeurs, there simply isn’t much to see.