NICO confounded expectations with the release of The Marble Index in 1968. The follow-up to the erstwhile model’s folk-pop debut, its avant-garde austerity sold little but posthumously acquired the status of countercultural masterpiece.

So it makes a strange kind of sense for The Nico Project, commissioned as part of Manchester International Festival, to draw on the album’s experimental, non-linear spirit. Inspired by its songs and her time in the city, to which she was drawn by the music and drugs, playwright EV Crowe seeks to create an immersive experience.

The one-act production opens with Maxine Peake wandering on stage under harsh house lights. She distractedly fiddles with a mic as it feeds back and, looking through her thick fringe, starts to speak in elliptical, repetitive lines. It’s unclear whether she’s talking to herself, to the audience, or working through lyrical ideas.

It’s equally ambiguous whether she’s playing herself, or someone inhabited by Nico’s ghost. There are apparitions a-plenty on stage, especially when a chair tumbles off its edge, and she’s clearly haunted by memories and the tension of creativity.

Yet the details of these demons constantly slip out of view in disconnected thoughts about train stations and searching for someone or something.

There are key scenes when it feels like some clarity is going to be shed — a claustrophobic reading of Frozen Warnings, during which the lights go out and Peake appears on a balcony intoning in a heavy Germanic accent and a fleeting moment when she seems to comfort a musician who may or may not represent her younger self. Yet these never amount to anything.

The most consistently affecting moments are rooted in the actual music, rearranged by Anna Clyne and performed by female members of the Royal Northern College of Music.

With the braided hair and costume of the Hitler Youth, referencing Nico’s childhood in nazi Germany, they form secondary characters while creating intense crescendos of neoclassical strings and juddering psychedelia.

The ambition of the new score is sadly never matched by the experimental dialogue, which leaves the audience without any clues or guidelines.

Peake is captivatingly intense and twitchy throughout but when she wanders offstage, having sung a bleak a capella version of Nibelungen, it feels as if nothing has been gained.

Runs until July 21, box office: mif.co.uk