Two years ago, when I first reviewed Idle Motion, they were a band of Oxford hopefuls who wanted to go to the Edinburgh Fringe with a complex piece of physical theatre called Borges and I. Last year they performed The Vanishing Horizon, again went north of the border and garnered a Guardian review identifying them as “a brilliant emerging company”.

The company gathered again this week at their alma mater, Cherwell School, for a couple of preview shows for the new Fringe outing, based on the famous hurricane of October 15, 1987 (cue forecaster Michael Fish: “Earlier on today, apparently a woman phoned the BBC and said there was a hurricane on the way — well, if you’re watching, there isn’t . . .”).

Who would think the six-strong cast could make so much of that night’s events in so bright a manner? The idea came from Idle Motion’s artistic director Paul Slater (who has stuck with them after teaching them drama at the school), born out of his own memories of that night — cast members then interviewed people about their experiences and the whole has been woven into a remarkable audio-visual hour.

Images of scudding clouds bounce off umbrellas, a rain-swept car (with headlights) is created in an instant, there is a wonderful butterfly moment, loose plastic sheeting at the rear of the set is cleverly used with excellent lighting effects and all the while a relationship is rekindled between Woman (Kate Stanley) and Man (Alex Kearley-Shiers, both pictured above).

Which is ultimately the thinking behind the play. “Although some things can never be replaced,” says the Narrator (Grace Chapman), “they can often be mended in time.” And they end with a quotation from the early-20th-century German intellectual Walter Benjamin: “A storm is blowing in from Paradise. This storm is what we call progress.” Stanley, Kearley-Shiers and Chapman, together with Finn Cockburn, Sophie Cullen and Ellie Simpson have another not-so-Idle success on their hands, as they re-occupy Edinburgh this month.

On their return the company will present The Seagull Effect at the Pegasus Theatre on September 16 and 17.