It’s always unnerving to enter an intimate auditorium and find the actors lying on the stage already, like you’ve arrived late to a small dinner party and it hasn’t gone unnoticed. And perhaps that was the intention behind this introduction – prepare the audience to be unsettled; start as you mean to go on.

As this is a new play, I went into it completely blind – the only piece of information I had, apart from the title, was a flyer I picked up on the way into the Studio, and very cryptic it was too: 'What is Freya’s terrible secret? Why is it so terrible?' So, my interest piqued, and the former drama student in me quite excited about the abstract chorus (whom I cleverly deduced were the three people lying on the stage wearing matching outfits), I settled in and put my concentrating face on.

And what an intense hour of theatre I was gifted. We start in a warmly-lit scene with Freya, our protagonist, and her sister. Freya has something to tell her sister, but she needs to explain it properly, so that her intentions and actions are not misunderstood, and from here we move neatly into the abstract. The eponymous ‘replaying’ of events surrounding Freya’s (a music teacher) relationship with a student (James) are recreated using the three-person chorus to great, and rather disconcerting, effect. The three actors (Benedict Morrison, Soraya Liu and Poppy Clifford) performed their roles brilliantly – often circling Freya (an earnest and convincing Mary Clapp) with their fractured, repeated speech, creating an atmosphere of unease and perhaps an insight into her own, lonely mind.

The set was sparse and symbolic, and the small space well-utilised. The writing is quite poetic, and that, coupled with the subject of an inappropriate relationship, brought to my mind Nabokov’s Lolita (high praise indeed – it’s one of my favourite books), which gets a brief mention towards the end of the play. Replay takes on a challenging topic and the play raises more questions than it answers, but isn’t that one of the exciting aspects of new theatre – that it evokes discussion and makes one question what they have witnessed?

I found it a really interesting performance, and look forward to seeing more from Alex Wilson in the future.