Doug Dean’s tight two hand piece (three if you count the DJ) 24, 23, 22 was a play conceived during lockdown, and some of that desperate, claustrophobic time still clings hard to this story of nervous edges and frantic interiority. Company Chronic Insanity is on tour right now with this gig theatre show, providing beats and a story; and a second story, darker and stranger, sliding backwards through the beats.

The crew greet the audience with sudden, easy, uncomfortable millennial familiarity, drawing the audience into a dark space of carefully constructed awkward intimacy, making it clear that the play is a play, that they are their own people, performing. The slides and revelations, when they come, are made all the harder by the intentional sideways drifts out of character, the side-eye and the sad pauses, the honest and real desire to give their characters compassion, a moment to recover, something, anything.

Joe Strickland’s clean open staging and accompaniment of bare beats keeps the focus tight on the two leads: Ruth Page as Fran pushes hard through the early 20s job market in awkward lunges, hung between the horrors and comforts of her old room at Mum’s, the hated boss, the queasy rounds of nights out and blackout hangovers, while Joe Matty, as Brendon, presents a series of desperate lunges for love, for meaning, for connection, for a way out of an end inescapable because it is already seen.

Flawed and broken, the characters spin around each other, daring the audience to be harsh in their judgement, to compare these two with friends they have loved and failed. Their stories slide backwards and forwards, over and through each other. In a world without easy answers or solutions, they find none, carry on, keep moving, until suddenly everything stops, drops and fades to black.