Silence, Royal Shakespeare Company/Filter, Hampstead Theatre

If your heart breaks a continent or more away from home, does it make a noise? Very much so in the scintillating Royal Shakespeare Company/Filter collaboration Silence, the second in a series of three RSC premieres at the Hampstead Theatre. Wedding Filter's interest in the synergy between technology and text with a subset of Shakespeareans who have been wandering the Forest of Arden on and off for the past two years, Silence plunges its expert ensemble into the forest of metal that makes up one aspect of Jon Bausor's set. Will the result be as you like it?

Technophobes may moan, even as others are reminded that our leading classical troupe is also capable, thank you very much, of being utterly contemporary, as well. And for a puzzle play of sorts, the show, co-created by its director, David Farr, fairly belts along, free from both the self-conscious gerrymandering that marred Filter's excruciating Three Sisters and the self-congratulatory undertow that accompanies Katie Mitchell, for instance, at her most techno-obsessed. (That's to say pieces like ....some trace of her at the National Theatre in 2008).

Sure, you clock the various soundboards occupying different levels of a staging that makes full use of the breadth and depth of the space, so you have to look hard to tell where the Hampstead's own side wall leaves off and purpose-built scaffolding begins.

But for all the virtuosity of Tim Phillips's sound design, you never lose track of the people caught up in uneasy marriages, journalistic sleuthing, and the daily routine (albeit much amplified) of a neighbour making toast, that last scenario contributing to a witty ongoing double act between Jonjo O'Neill and Mariah Gale that finds levity in an often anxious landscape.

The RSC has been in Russian mode quite a bit of late. And so the Company turns out to be again here in a narrative that sends Katy Stephens, playing a Battersea wife called Kate, tearing off to Moscow to track down a certain Alexei (Filter co-founder Ferdy Roberts), a music-mad rebel for whom she fell hard over a shared affection for Little Richard nearly 20 years before; their sudden passion, sealed with a kiss on the U-Bahn, capped a pill-popping rave-up for Kate in a Berlin club that, one senses, was part of a life that has quietened down to some degree since.

Kate's husband of five years is Michael (Oliver Dimsdale), a documentary film-maker torn between "this piece of footage [as] all that matters" and his unexpressed, all but silent wish to be a father before it's too late: a careerist craving both domestic survival and a breakthrough at work. The play effects witty variations on conversations either drowned out (there's a great Skype joke) or rendered superfluous or made impossible due to miscommunication; "the wrong sound" brings to a grievous head Michael's surveillance-themed project even as Kate battles a condition that makes things aural a form of torture.

Silence contains all the appurtenances of a Wooster Group-style deconstruction of events, so it's both a surprise and a delight that the evening is as lucid and often droll as it is. Christine Entwistle fields a delicious array of women of varying degrees of unhelpfulness, while Gale (pictured above right with O'Neill), juggling several roles, stills an audience that she then restores to laughter, playing a drunken airline employee unaware that her every move is being taped by the sound recordist next door. Best of all is Stephens in vibrant, febrile form as a romantic attuned to what George Eliot referred to as "the noise on the other side of silence", a phenomenon to which Farr and his colleagues give pride of place. Audiences owe it to themselves to give a listen.

• Silence is at the Hampstead Theatre, London, until 28 May
• See what’s on at the Hampstead Theatre
• Find Silence on Amazon