At the theatre after some years of relying on the cinema for my visual stimulus, I am shocked by the three dimensional bodies of actors rotating and breathing in front of me. Cinema is a flat world swelled only by music, where everything you see is included for a reason, and body parts are amputated and blown up on the screen as ciphers of feeling. The camera zooms in on hands, twisting in nervousness or reaching for a gun or clasping one another in fear or desire or an attempt not to fall from the 25th floor. Eyes, lips, heaving breasts fill the field of vision as the violins howl. Each body part carries such a surfeit of meaning (apparently Hugh Jackman's beard had its own separate screen tests for Australia) that the sight of an entire organism could overwhelm the viewer completely. All that exists is the piece in the frame.

At the theatre, on the contrary, there they are, living human anatomies, the kneebone connected to the thighbone connected to the hipbone. Nothing is obscured, nothing is irrelevant. You can see their eyes and feet all at once; their fronts have backs, their tops have bottoms. The character is built slowly, in the thrust of a hip, the motion of a wrist, a shifty sideways glance. The bodies must only move as the person they are pretending to be, in a dance equal parts freedom and constraint.

At first I find them oddly unconvincing: they are too much on display, they cannot possibly be anything but themselves, clumsily faking another set of mannerisms, another life. But look what happens as the show proceeds: I am drawn in, slowly but completely, to this imaginary world, to the orbit of these three bodies. It is only a story, but a story lived in every muscle and sinew of the three men on stage, who must surely forget who they are for the duration of the show, who must surely cease to be who they are until they are recalled to themselves by the applause of the audience.

It is pure magic. The human body, unairbrushed, unmade up, unrepentantly flesh, is more lovely and more expressive in its entirety than it could ever be when decomposed on screen.