The fantastical and often grotesquely peculiar world of Flann O'Briens The Third Policeman has continued to baffle many a curious and intrepid reader over the years.

Written in 1939, but not published until 1967, after the authors passing, The Third Policeman was initially greeted with bewilderment by O'Briens publishers who had hoped that the Irish author might have reined in the more esoteric and abstract tendencies that had punctuated his first novel, the now-seminal At-Swim-Two-Birds.

Instead, O'Brien presented them with a work of post-modern fiction, one that eschewed traditional form in favour of non-linear (and often baffling) literary impulses. Frequent references to allusive meta-fictional theories abound and often threaten to overrun the novel's core – essentially a story of greed in rural Ireland, and the subsequent consequences brought on by the protagonists quest to satisfy his own materialistic desires.

All traces of logic are dismantled and capriciously reassembled to construct a disorientating examination of psych and soul in a rural Ireland populated by mad scientists, irrational scientific concepts, a two-dimensional police station hidden within the walls of a house, bicycles that are half people, people that are half-bicycles, police sergeants obsessed with turning sound into light and a mysterious black box containing omnium, which can become anything the possessor desires.

It is, in essence, John Synge's The Playboy of the Western World set in an Irish rural hell and spliced with quasi-mystic theology and far-fetched spins on Einstein's theory of relativity. But while its influence can be seen in TV shows such as Lost (which featured the book in one episode) and The Extraordinary League of Gentlemen, a satisfying literal translation to the theatrical stage had proven to be more elusive. In 2007 Galway's Blue Raincoat Theatre Company stepped up to the challenge and reaped the rewards, earning widespread plaudits for taking the idiosyncratic traits of O'Briens novel and transferring it to the stage.

"Part of the book's attraction for me was because it was a difficult post-modern masterpiece written purely for the page as opposed to theatre," says Jocelyn Clarke, who took on the task of adapting The Third Policeman for The Blue Raincoat Theatre Company. The company are now preparing to take the show on the road for it's first tour, which includes four dates at Corks Everyman Theatre from Monday, May 19 through to Thursday, May 22.

"The central narrative of The Third Policeman is an archetypal quest story, but instead of a Holy Grail, it is a black cash box," says Jocelyn, when explaining the difficulties in bringing O'Brien's vision of a midlands Dante's inferno to the stage. "The beginning of book is relatively straightforward – sort of. Two men, the anonymous narrator and his farm-manger/pub manager kill a man for his black cash box – so that the anonymous narrator can publish his complete Index of the works of an obscure philosopher De Selby and Diviney can marry his long time girlfriend.

Unfortunately, Diviney hides the black box for three years, until such time as 'things have quietened down'. Then one day, Diviney tell the anonymous narrator the box is hidden in their victim's house; he goes to house, lifts up a floorboard, puts his hand on the box and it disappears…

"The anonymous narrator spends the rest of the book, in the company of his soul, whom he call Joe, searching for the box. On his quest he encounters a world presided over by two policeman, Sergeant Pluck and Officer MacCruiskeen, where the laws of science have been cruelly subverted, turning reality as he understands it on its head…

If then this is the story of the book in its simplest form, then this is the central dramatic narrative from which all the events and incidents of my adaptation spring. The narrator is the central character, and everything happens to him – he is the protagonist, and the world is the antagonist. And the world he finds himself is hell, and he is being punished for his crime. But O'Brien's version of hell is unusual in that it is the hell of the Eternal Return – as his soul Joe tells him in an oft-quoted passage that was omitted from the published novel: 'Joe had been explaining things in the meantime. He said it was again the beginning of the unfinished, the re-discovery of the familiar, the re-experience of the already suffered, the fresh-forgetting of the unremembered. Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular and by nature it is interminable, repetitive and very nearly unbearable'.