While many of the artistic events commemorating the centenary of the first world war have focused on the carnage in France and Flanders, there has been little attention paid to the Alpine campaign fought along the Italian border. Ernest Hemingway – who was there as an 18-year-old ambulance driver – described it as “the picturesque front”: and the wonder of this adaptation is that it manages to convey the beauty as well as the horror of this theatre of war.

Transferring Hemingway’s terse, tough-guy prose to the stage is no straightforward task, though Imitating the Dog – a troika of radical dramaturgs and theatrical technocrats led by Andrew Quick, Peter Brooks and Simon Wainwright – preface the show with a quote by the French philosopher Michel de Certeau that states: “Reading makes the text habitable, like a rented apartment.”

Contained within what appears to be an abandoned hospital ward, the staging does seem to inhabit the text, as video animations of Hemingway’s words coalesce and suddenly disperse like a murmuration of starlings. An onstage crew of film-makers enables close-up conversations to be beamed across nursing screens several metres apart. And the temporal fluidity of the writing is seamlessly handled: Hemingway’s out-of-body description of being seriously wounded in a mortar blast becomes a breathtaking, sustained passage in which the actors appear to be tumbling through a universe of digital shrapnel.

The one criticism that could be be levelled at Imitating the Dog’s deployment of meta-theatrical apparatus is that it can make the acting appear a bit of an afterthought. Yet the subtitled Italian ensemble work is brisk and fluent, while Jude Monk McGowan has an intense, cinematic charisma sufficient to carry the central, first-person role. Such a confident conflation between text and technology suggests that Imitating the Dog is not only a company without imitators, it is currently without peer.

• Until 25 October. Box office: 01524 598500. Then touring. imitatingthedog.co.uk