Lucy Moss is lounging on one of the sofas in Caius JCR, typing furiously on a Mac perched on her lap. As I walk over, she looks up and smiles, snaps her laptop shut, and rises to shake my hand. Lucy is the director for the Corpus Playroom lateshow Product. It’s a play I’ve heard nothing about, and she is keen to fill me in.

“Basically, this producer is trying to sell his idea for a script to a famous actress, with the idea that he has to get her on board at all costs. He’s trying to use any means possible to convince her that this is the best script ever – but the problem is, the film is super-offensive. In some productions they’ve named the script ‘Mohammed and Me’”, and at this point Lucy pauses to pull a face at me. “It’s pretty awful. A woman from London meets this Muslim guy on a plane and ends up taking him home with her. He turns out to be a terrorist, and then she becomes a terrorist, but then she changes her mind after a dream… It’s the worst script ever, but because the producer is selling it so hard there are parts which become almost convincing. It’s very funny and very dark.”

Lucy pauses for breath, and we get onto talking about whether the play is making a statement about Islamophobia. “The producer never tries to be political – the statement of the play is about him embarrassing himself with his terrible script. He’ll make a story about anything, and this is what is selling at the moment. The play is called Product; it’s making a statement about how people will make a narrative about anything to sell films. It’s really interesting to consider what’s acceptable to be told as a story. And as well – the play was originally written as a one-man play by Mark Ravenhill for him to perform at Edinburgh, so he is ironically selling himself in the process.”

So who’s the lead? “We’ve done something a bit different - we have four people playing the same character throughout, and it’s actually all-female.” Lucy laughs as I look at her in surprise. “Yeah, I was casting it gender-blind originally, and I had it in my mind that I would cast men because there is an undercurrent of ironic sexism in the play.  But Cambridge has such an abundance of female talent – for every good male actor there are five good female actors, so when I held auditions it became clear very quickly that it would work better with all-women. I feel like you can get away with more with female actors – there’s something really interesting about watching a female actor playing a man being very sexist about women.

“The play is difficult to stage because it gives you so much but also so little to work with”, Lucy reaches for her script to show me. The script is only a few pages long, and it’s one long monologue. “The script is probably the most difficult that I’ve had to work on because there are so many nuances to it. It’s been tricky to work out how this would work as an ensemble piece.”

I ask Lucy how she thinks the play will be received. She looks slightly worried, but then laughs. “My dream is to get a five-star and a one-star review. I have no idea how it’s going to go down – I think this is going to polarise people a lot. It’s about toeing the line – we don’t want to be scared of offending people, we want to make the play dramatic and appealing, but at the same time we want people to see that it’s tongue-in-cheek. A lot of people will hate it, but hopefully a lot of people are going to really get it.”

Product will be on at the Corpus Playroom at 9:30pm from Tuesday 2nd-Saturday 6th February 2015.