"Blackout Songs". Burton Taylor Studio

The publicity material describes Blackout Songs as an 'intensely intimate exploration of tenderness, memory and addiction'. But it's more than that. This is a love story written in the dregs of a wine bottle. 

Two people meet at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and the play maps out their on/off relationship over an unspecified span of years. And it's unspecified for a reason. Joe White's play, first staged in 2022, captures moments of lucidity between what might be days, months or years of inebriation. The two women (I'm not sure we ever learn their real names) sometimes don't even recognise each other, and sometimes heap resentment and recrimination full of mis-memories around themselves like fortifications against an army of emotional rejection. But they keep coming back for more - because there are two addictions at work here: alcoholism and - equally fatal - human attraction.

In its original, professional form, Blackout Songs was a sobering analysis of two hopeless drunks, a man and a woman. Their mutual affection dripped through the slurry of their speech like coffee through coarse grounds. For this production, director Yael Erez has made the bold, experimental step of taking the performances away from any semblance of drunkenness. Instead, the two actors, Mimi Berridge Shea and Leya Carter, speak their parts with absolute clarity, as if they really are the 'songs' of the title. 

The effect is fascinating. It pulls us in two directions at the same time. On the one hand, the words themselves are fixed: they betray the characters' imprisonment in the next glass of what they euphemistically call 'medicine'. On the other, the performances are imbued with crystalline lucidity. The characteristic verbal fumbles and mental wandering of the drunk become a kind of honest openness leavened with poetic meditation. Outbursts of rage, which might look like a meths-fuelled slanging match if they were played as conventionally drunk, sound more like desperate cries from a damaged soul.

And those lost weekends given up to drink are expressed here not merely as blackouts, but as expressive dance. In a blue light of surreal suspension, Carter's and Berridge Shea's bodies twist into attitudes of co-dependence and defiance, before finding themselves once again at each other's doors in the next scene. 

Both of these concepts are radical and sensitive approaches, especially when applied to such a modern work. But Erez has yet another big idea, which forms, literally and metaphorically, the base of the entire show. And that is, of all things, the floor. Lord knows how she got permission for this, but she's covered the entire stage area with a thick layer of soil. By the end, both actors are caked in mud and blood-coloured paint. The soil works a weird magic on the play. Like a fine wine, it has different nuances: sometimes it feels like the grave that awaits the hopeless drinker; sometimes it feels like the life-source of a budding love that grows stronger as the years pass; sometimes it feels like the natural, base stuff of human life itself - and sometimes all of these at once.

Against these directorial flourishes, White's play itself may be the least impressive part of the evening. It's lyrical and non-linear, but it's also a bit lumbering. The succession of blackouts, conflicts, confessions and memories, while fascinating, begins to feel like the very endless cycle of addiction that it sets out to depict. There is progression, but - perhaps due in part to the defective memories of the protagonists - it sometimes feels like two steps forward and one step back. An hour may have suited it better than ninety minutes.

But this is a minor quibble. And on top of all the imaginative staging, we are treated to a pair of performances from actors who are relatively new to Oxford student theatre, but will be finding themselves in many a leading role in the coming months. Leya Carter (building on her last appearance in the similarly-structured Constellations) is initially nervous, twitchy and reticent before discovering self-assertion in the latter stages, while Mimi Berridge Shea is full of denial disguised as banter, a skater on the thinnest ice of depression. On the rough soil of Blackout Songs' set, neither ever quite finds solid ground. But something powerful has taken root.