"Dead End". Burton Taylor Studio

Sometimes you can go to the theatre and have an experience like visiting a Michelin-starred restaurant: all prancing style, surprises and dramatic flavours new to your palate, delivered with such impeccable professionalism that you stagger out slightly dazed, worrying about your heart. And sometimes it can be more like the dramatic equivalent of going to a simple tea-room, where the menu offers jacket potatoes and toasted sandwiches: undemanding, familiar, but good, honest nourishment.

Dead End, a new play by Marie Doinne, falls into tea-room territory.

Comparing this production with other recent pieces of Oxford new writing, there are no giddy leaps through time, no stunning revelations, no supernatural characters. There isn’t even a talking grizzly bear. Instead, there is a kind of Platonic dialogue between two clearly opposed points of view. Bea and Olivia grew up as friends, but while Bea has gone into the world of commerce and marketing, Olivia has become an environmentally-aware, small-scale sculptor. And over 45 minutes of sombre, touching debate, their relationship comes, gently, firmly, and irretrievably, to an end.

It’s static. So static that at one point, when a tiny piece of Olivia’s pottery gets smashed on the floor, the instant positively throbs with significance, like the moment in Jane Austen’s Persuasion when the wilful Louisa trips over in Lyme Regis. It feels momentous because virtually nothing else constituting physical incident happens in that entire novel. Olivia’s and Bea’s discussion ranges across different topics: they ponder the value of function versus aesthetic, the artist versus the entrepreneur, the environmental versus the commercial. But really it’s all the same debate: society or self. Sophie Gray and Maisie Saunders maintain a controlled, focussed tone throughout, and Doinne’s direction is sparse and honest.

But is it really as simple as this? The two sides in this ideological see-saw are almost like mouthpieces for square-one, starter-level political positions. In the real world there are legions of commercially-minded entrepreneurs searching for ways to save the planet, and there are plenty of struggling artists willing to accept a couple of thousand pounds to do a portrait. What makes the conflict of ideas interesting is its complexity. But the standard of debate here is pretty basic, of the ‘You only care about yourself’ – ‘Yes, but one can’t live without money’ variety.

The saving grace is the fact that Bea and Olivia do, despite everything, love each other – or at least they share a memory of having loved each other while growing up. That simple strand of connection gives Dead End a truly touching thread of honesty – the nourishment of the humble tea-room. Is it enough to make this into a great night at the theatre? Perhaps not quite. To return to the sculpture metaphor, it's more like one of Olivia's own simple sculptures than, say Michelangelo’s David. Its sincerity is unquestionable, but Dead End could use a little more va-va-voom.

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, ‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function’. The characters in Dead End keep their two opposed ideas firmly on opposite sides of the workbench.