Is there anything quite so enjoyable as a bit of meta-theatre?

Oxford has been spoilt with it in recent times. When You Pass Over My Tomb used realities within realities to address the fuzzy line separating life from death. Unprofessional demolished the fourth wall in its hilariously tongue-in-cheek critique of personal achievement. And The Writer gave us a central character who tries to make sense of her own life by fictionalising it in her art.

Now the writing/directing team of Billy Skiggs and Billy Hearld, collectively known as ‘The Billys’ (and I can’t help thinking that they get a tiny kick out of having a shared name ending in a y that doesn’t change to ie in the plural despite having a consonant before the final letter) have produced a gloriously twisted piece of self-referential entertainment called To What End?

Ostensibly the title refers to the fact that the characters in the Billys’ play have lost the final page of their own script, and they literally need to know What Happens In The End. But the double meaning is even more appropriate: to what end are we even doing all this? What is the point? And how do we escape from this endless round of conversational eddies and dramatic false doors? In one scene the writer and director are being cross-examined in a police-station scenario, and the same lines go round faster and faster as the characters panic that they’ll never move on. It’s like a Line of Duty interrogation done by Abbot and Costello.

The Billys are interested in using their Escher-like structure not so much to address deep questions of life, but to watch their characters run around like experimental rats in a maze. In other words, the confusion they experience is the meaning. They’re like explorers lost in a jungle who keep coming back to the same clearing no matter how hard they try to escape. Their agony is our amusement. And if you want to know what it all means, then I suspect you might already have missed the point.

As the audience members make their way in, Noel Coward is warbling from a scratchy 78, and his effetely delicious wordplay (‘The smallest Malay rabbit deplores this foolish habit’) is one of the inspirations for the wittiness that oozes through this play like honey through a portion of baklava. Characters are constantly making intellectual declarations that brilliantly fail to make any sense at all, as if they want to be Oscar Wilde but just can’t quite manage it. ‘Ours is a culture of multisyllables, my love’, declares one. Another recites, ‘In Flanders Field did Kubla Kahn a stately pleasure dome decree’, and vaguely realises that he might have got it mixed up. ‘Consider the gaps between the silences’, advises the director meaninglessly, before commenting that the whole thing is ‘very fin de circle’. They’re not above a smutty pun or two either, as the writer boasts, ‘I probe the anals of the literary greats!’ The verbal playfulness is perhaps inspired by the Billys’ tutor at Magdalen College, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, who, as well as being a revered authority on Victorian literature, is a master of innuendo.

As the director Albie, Peregrine Neger is a comic creation to cherish. He’s like a reject from Gormenghast, a nincompoop with one foot in the complete works of Shakespeare and the other in his own mouth. At one supremely bizarre moment he recites the ‘Is this a dagger’ speech from Macbeth but does it in a kind of Chaucerian/Old English style: ‘Ez thees a dargger that ah says bifoour mi?’ Why? God knows, but it is blissful.

Neger is accompanied by a cast who are all clearly enjoying every moment, and their exchanges twinkle with inconsequentiality. Luke Carroll and Georgina Cotes as the husband and wife acting team lurch between bitter matrimonial acrimony and wartime frivolity with the bathetic squeak of a needle scratching across a vinyl record. Meanwhile, Sanaa Pasha and Madison Howarth get dragged into Albie’s metafiction like farmers who’ve just slipped and fallen in the slurry. And Tomasz Hearfield, as the writer Bernard, is the lone voice of near-sanity, admitting that the reason he doesn’t know how the play ends is that he actually copied it from someone else in the first place.

To What End is far from being a ‘great play’ (whatever that means). It’s a little exercise, a clutch of amusing ideas that started as a scribble and were allowed to go wherever they wanted. But what, in a sense, could be more wonderful than that? It’s the theatrical equivalent of a great intellect having a day off, like doing the Times Cryptic Crossword on a Spanish beach. My mind they have mated and amazed my sense. I review, but dare not think.