There is a particular cruelty, and a particular comedy, in handing a sealed script to a man who has spent his career sealing scripts for other people. Reece Shearsmith built his name on the twist the writer knows is coming and the audience does not. For one night at the Duchess Theatre that arrangement flips: he will be the last performer of this London season to open the envelope of Nassim Soleimanpour’s White Rabbit Red Rabbit without having read a single line of it.

He will not be alone in the final stretch. Jessica Hynes, who co-created Spaced and later skewered the BBC’s own management on screen, takes her turn shortly before him, in what the producers describe as her first theatre appearance in more than five years. Olivia Cooke, of House of the Dragon and Slow Horses, goes before both of them.

Three men smiling inside the Duchess Theatre at the opening of the White Rabbit Red Rabbit anniversary run — Photo: Sarah Larby Photography

The format is the whole proposition. Each evening a different actor walks on, is handed a sealed envelope and performs a text they have never seen, once, with no rehearsal and no director. What the audience watches is less a performance than a negotiation between a performer’s instincts and a writer who is absent from the room yet seems to anticipate every hesitation. Soleimanpour wrote the play while he was barred from leaving Iran, after refusing compulsory military service cost him his passport, and its preoccupations with obedience, choice and the fragile contract between stage and stalls grew out of that confinement. It is a text that travelled when its author could not.

Since its first performance in 2011, according to the announcement, it has been staged more than 4,000 times and translated into over 25 languages. This 15th-anniversary run is also the first production from There & Then, the company Soleimanpour has founded with the director Omar Elerian, whose credits include Misty, NASSIM and Evening Standard Award-winning Almeida stagings of Ionesco’s The Chairs and Rhinoceros.

There is a neat symmetry in Shearsmith’s slot. His Inside No. 9 and The League of Gentlemen partner Steve Pemberton took the envelope in October, so the duo who taught British television to distrust its own premises will both have faced a script engineered to ambush them. The producers bill Hynes as a double BAFTA winner and Shearsmith as an Olivier nominee. Earlier volunteers this season included three former Doctor Who leads, David Tennant, Jodie Whittaker and Christopher Eccleston, alongside Riz Ahmed, Kathryn Hunter and Joe Lycett.

Theatregoers gathering on Catherine Street outside the Duchess Theatre for White Rabbit Red Rabbit — Photo: Sarah Larby Photography

Performances take place on Monday evenings at 7.30pm at the Duchess Theatre on Catherine Street, Covent Garden. Cooke plays on 23 November, Hynes on 30 November and Shearsmith on 14 December, the night the anniversary season closes. Tickets start at £25.

For Hynes it is a return; for Shearsmith, a reversal. For the audience, as ever with this play, the pleasure lies in watching a gifted actor discover the words in real time, only a breath ahead of everyone else in the room.

Tags: Reece Shearsmith, Olivia Cooke, Duchess Theatre, Jessica Hynes, Nassim Soleimanpour, Omar Elerian