A love affair. A broken heart. An Italian summer filled with romance, grass, sky and architecture. Two people gripped by a passion so intense it consumes them, and then moves on, leaving them empty, resentful, yearning for what they so briefly had, but feeling only the emptiness of the memory. Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?

Natascha Norton’s twinkling jewel of a playlet captures a summer everyone should experience if they can. Heartbreak is so often the key that unlocks previously hidden halls of creativity and expression, and that is certainly what has happened here. Norton’s play is only forty minutes long. It’s a theatrical haiku that concentrates all that youthful desire into the blink of an eye.

Over a series of brief, snapshot scenes, two characters, ‘Her’ and ‘Him’ fall in and out of love. Their very namelessness confers a kind of universality on the experience. How many empty hotel rooms in hot European capitals hold the shadows of a Her and a Him by the end of September? I was reminded of F.W. Murnau’s 1927 masterpiece Sunrise in which the characters are merely identified as ‘The Man’ and ‘The Woman’. It could be just… anyone.

But how to turn such an evanescent experience into a meaningful moment of drama? The answer Norton and Director Rosie Morgan-Males (helming, somewhat incredibly, her second show of this term as well as assisting on a third) have come up with is to partner the action with a constant background of film. Sometimes the screen reflects the characters’ moods with surreal shapes or impressionist montages. Sometimes it features the characters themselves, out walking, sitting on benches. Sometimes it reveals them speaking their inner thoughts which they could not do face to face. At one point ‘He’ on screen actually talks to ‘Her’ on stage, underlining the impassable barrier that has grown between them. As a concept it feels both original and completely natural.

Film is being used more and more as an essential part of drama. Over the past few months in Oxford it has featured in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, The Lover and Agamemnon. In Crocodile Tears it seems perfectly knitted into the life of the play itself, the screen a third presence on the stage. And the filming itself is wonderfully stylish, evoking Italian cinema of the 60s and 70s: atmospheric, faded, and straying with no qualms whatsoever into charmingly innocent pretentiousness. There’s more than a hint of French nouvelle vague in there too, with jump cuts and incongruous juxtapositions suggesting inner turmoil and confusion. Oxford and Italy meld on the silver screen: Bertolucci meets Brasenose. This is Last Tango in Pembroke, and Director of Photography George Robson has perfectly embodied the mood of Norton’s wistful script.

While watching Crocodile Tears, I was reminded of Normal People, another screen-based tale of star-crossed love gone awry. In that show we cared about Marianne and Connell because we got to know everything about them. But here we learn next to nothing about ‘Her’ and ‘Him’. Any backstory is hinted at, unexplored. Norton’s focus is not on creating characters we like, but in depicting a moment of connection: she’s showing us the meeting of their lips, not their brains. This is not to say that Elektra Voulgari Cleare and Flynn Ivo give two-dimensional performances. Quite the reverse: they are convincing, real and give great performances. But we don’t get to learn about their lives. It’s like watching two icebergs crash together: we only see the tips.

Given the poetic nature of this show – it’s really like a love sonnet recreated as theatre – I actually wonder if forty minutes might even be too long. At three-quarters of an hour it feels like a short play. But if they cut it to under thirty minutes it might capture the real evanescent flavour of a cherished moment in time.

Labyrinth Productions make running theatre and film side-by-side look easy in this production. But in truth it’s a complex task. As well as getting the cues to flow perfectly in time with the action (which they do here), it’s also incredibly hard to illuminate the actors properly without spilling light or shadows onto the screen, and making the film invisible. In Crocodile Tears the tech is seamlessly integrated with the action, and you hardly notice the work that must have gone in to get it so precise. Maybe that’s the sort of professionalism that comes with doing so many shows in one term. Over the last two years Norton and Morgan-Males have literally churned out theatre. Earlier this term they gave us Closer, and next term they are venturing into the Playhouse with A View from the Bridge. There is no stopping them, and I can’t wait to see what comes next.

Crocodile Tears is delicate and beautiful, a fragile statuette of a play. Tonight its modest size was matched by an equally petite audience. This show may not have the mass appeal of Derren Brown: Only Human which had queues all the way down George Street waiting to see a man pretend to be psychic. But it has a heart as big as a whale. It’s on for two more days. Don’t miss it.