There’s a strand of speculative fiction that plonks you straight into a boggling scenario, then gives you dribs and drabs of information to decode it, before laying the whole thing painstakingly out. That’s where Simon Stephens’s irritating play comes from. It’s overlaid by self-conscious quirkiness.
Two men cower in a bunker after some unspecified holocaust, testily acting out ritualised exchanges to stave off despair. If the scenario vaguely recalls Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, the characters are more like the two clowns in Waiting for Godot, only younger.
