A shot rang out. No, no. The scripts on the desk between the two characters in Stam vs O’Neill’s production say nothing so emphatic. The lines spoken by writer Gert-Jan Stam and actor Jody O’Neill are often at cross-purposes, deliberately evasive or elliptical, often banal. Reflexively drawing attention to the fact that they are performing from the text, O’Neill shows Stam his place on the page at one point, and later mimes to the soundtrack of her own voice making a stirring speech.

Swapping lines, these two figures - not quite characters - speak over and past each other: he describes the minutiae of the writing process, she asks rhetorical questions about herself and her identity. “In what ways did I try to become an artist?” Some violent scenes and memories are described in the same self-conscious, rather ponderous manner, touching on questions of gender, misogyny and power; of the fatal attraction of guns.

A performer of coiled poise, O’Neill has great presence, and the pair’s entrance, both drenched in water, suggests intriguing potential for some release from all this abstraction. But while one floor-based movement sequence offers distraction, their duelling remains word-locked. They're just shooting the breeze, after all.