If you want Herman Melville’s short story about Bartleby, the man who "would prefer not" to do what he is asked, in its original 19th-century American setting you won’t find it here. Instead, the story’s law office has been shifted to modern urban Australia where the Old Lawyer (Max Cullen) has brought in a Young Lawyer (Dene Kermond) to revitalise the firm. Bartleby (Ben Crowley) arrives because he is the only applicant for a necessary supporting clerk’s job.

The two lawyers are locked into a tussle over new and old methods. Old Lawyer can’t cope with faxes and certainly not email. Young Lawyer can’t cope with a Luddite. Neither can agree on the way to conduct a job interview and the Old Lawyer can’t stand the modern approach to conciliation after an office row.

As for Bartleby, he seems unable to cope terribly well with life but initially shows a huge appetite for the work he is given.

Then he starts refusing to do anything. Tolerance becomes more difficult with the business of the firm at stake. Various disintegrations are inevitable.

Crowley makes a touchingly shambolic Bartleby whose repeated refusals bring forth little sympathy from Kermond’s driven Young Lawyer and greatly test the goodwill of Cullen’s humanitarian Old Lawyer. There’s never a point where any clear reason for Bartleby’s "I would prefer not" emerges. What exactly is his difficulty? Or is this piece all a surreal commentary upon the nature of the modern workplace and the chance that it drives people mad?

Kermond is ruthlessly funny as the Young Lawyer for whom humanity seems to be less important than getting ahead. But it’s the Old Lawyer, safe in the hands of scene-stealing Cullen, who at least seems to have some notion of a richer life even if his is reduced to evenings alone with the cat and Melville’s Moby-Dick.

Julian Hobba’s adaptation cannot resist the lure of the whale and the deck of the Pequod turns up in the Old Lawyer’s dreams aided by evocative lighting and sound from Gillian Schwab and Kimmo Vennonen. Christine Nowak’s spare set accommodates both the surreal and the prosaic, with imaginative use being made of an upstage passage where only heads can be seen through blurred glass at the top of a room divider.

All of this is darkly amusing, somewhat disturbing and rather enjoyable, especially by anyone who has spent time in a bureaucracy. And it might send you off to the rewards of Melville’s original story.