If this is the best Torben Betts can do then you can count me out of any future shows. This sparse play certainly provides a useful blank canvas for director Adam Barnard to fill, but there’s no magic or real insight here. We get the occasional verbal frill, a passing Ayckbourn-stylee quip, a vague sense of unease, but no guts. Betts wrote this in 2008 and it seems that the heightened realism he was earlier admired for has been replaced with diluted absurdism. The result is a play that seems to be pushing deep, but is really just scratching the surface with elegant precision.

Perhaps this play grates because it is trying too hard to be something it is not. At its heart it is a relatively simple piece, tracking a couple’s disintegration as their countryside retreat collapses under the weight of false expectation. Convinced that a simple life will rid them of the city’s ills, the two soon realise that without distraction, there’s not much left. But it is atmosphere and not emotion that Betts is after here, and instead of wriggling underneath his characters’ skins, he paints them with bold, broad sweeps. So whilst the spikey and occasionally poetic verse might evoke a slight sense of trepidation, it is hard really to give a damn.

The couple stand in isolated patches on opposite sides of the stage, talk directly to the audience and for the most part ignore each other. Their overlapping monologues sag with contradictions that spell out the destruction of their idyll: the unnamed woman’s repeated desire to ‘people the country with children’ clashes ominously with her husband’s angry lust for isolation and relief. With the couple’s demise forecast from the start where have we got left to go? Nowhere – instead we circle slowly, repetitively (but not in the teasing, crushing manner of Beckett) and somewhat pretentiously around the inevitable implosion of their relationship. Emily Bowker and Chris Harper are both skilled and nuanced actors, but although their energy and humour light up the show, there isn’t a great deal to illuminate here.

Barnard is a smart and precise director, but I suspect he chose this play for the wrong reasons. He is certainly in-tune with Betts’ writing, and his directorial touches thread nicely into the play’s fabric: laced in between the scenes we get silent movie style projections, detailing the upcoming action. The stage is kept meticulously bare, with only the two actors and their chalk scrawls to fill it. But although these neat touches work excellently within the context of the play, they only heighten the characters’ and audience’s detachment from reality. Instead of being pulled into this strange world we get pushed further away from it, so that by the time their anguish hits, it is nothing more than vaguely irritating.

Near the play’s close, the TV is switched on and we hear snatches from the outside world, where war is raging and the apocalypse closing in. This last ditch attempt to open the play out reeks of a writer who distrusts his own work, and instead of enriching his play, this only reminds us of its limited scope and vision.

Till 2 May 2009