Unsure where to start in recounting his love affair with the stage, David Rattigan first mentions a brief stint at primary school playing ‘Pontius Pilate with a Yorkshire accent’, second, his failure to be cast in his college Freshers’ Play. He is, of course, being overly humble: directors David Rattigan and Matthew Lee – the latter of whom is, casually, doing a Mathematical Physics PhD – are theatre enthusiasts of the first water, perhaps most notably for their membership of New Word Order. This dramatic writing collective, a brave albeit fledgling initiative, was behind KNOTS, the three experimental plays staged at the Pembroke Cellars in Michaelmas. Their latest collaborative venture, though not original per se (they seem to have capitalised not inconsiderably on their author’s fame), looks to be a breath of fresh air.

A one-act, less-than-an-hour-long show (though which has happily nabbed the Corpus mainshow spot), Riverside Drive is one of Woody Allen’s newest and least known works. As Rattigan points out, the plot is unconventional: taking as its focus the relationship (if one can call it that) between screenwriter Jim Swain (Seb Sutcliffe) and homeless man Fred Savage (Saul Boyer), it is a far cry from early Allen rom-coms Annie Hall and Manhattan. It is tough to pin down generically, as Boyer describes: ‘We’ve rehearsed almost as if there were two plays. On the one hand we’ve got Woody Allen’s brilliant linguistic vibrancies; on the other, a lot of crass physical humour’. The play treads a delicate tight-rope, then, between being physically and intellectually funny – to achieve both will be a feat of comic brilliance.

Yet as much as the four talk up the play as a comedy (perhaps acknowledging Cambridge’s current need for light relief) I cannot help but notice its tragic potential. The note of tragedy is of course sounded by Fred’s homelessness: a particularly pertinent issue in Cambridge, Fred serves as a reminder of our own bourgeois discomfort around and assumptions about the poor. Whereas we might almost unthinkingly tune out to the touting of a Big Issue seller, here we are Fred’s captive audience. Though to some extent what Sutcliffe calls a ‘caricature’, Fred disproves many stereotypes about the homeless: most pertinently, their lack of education. Fred is, so it would seem, incredibly erudite, falling easily into a discussion about Camus and Sartre. Is this really that funny, or is our finding it so humorously oxymoronic proof of our own snobbery?

Not only this, but despite his indubitably comic character, Fred commands a Gatsby-esque mystique: ‘You’re not sure what he’s made up and what he hasn’t,’ says Lee. ‘He potentially has worked for an advertising agency, he potentially has a PhD in Sanskrit. You’re convinced he’s lying, but then he says something which seems to prove it.’ It is ironically he rather than Jim, a man who lives on his wits, who provides, says Boyer, the play’s ‘creative driving force’. In fact, Rattigan says, ‘Jim is constantly trying to end the play’, parrying Fred’s persistent efforts at conversation. It is here that the play’s psychoanalytic relevance becomes apparent: Fred is the id to Jim’s superego, the brute (i.e. Savage) creative energy channelled into Jim’s neurotic, hard-nosed movie-mindedness. Or perhaps just the talkative tramp who stalks him.

Riverside Drive’s bizarre combination of verbal repartee and slapstick, cartoonish eccentricity and abrupt emotional depth, is the sort of thing that needs to be seen to be believed. Thankfully, I’ve been allowed to stick around for a rehearsal. I’m impressed that it is Seb Sutcliffe (Jim), rather than the directors, who insists he be stopped as they go along, and indeed the scene that unfolds is punctuated with perspicacious directions, particularly from the eagle-eyed Lee. It is only at this point that the amount of thought that has gone into the directors’ vision becomes evident. As writers themselves, Lee and Rattigan are confident flagging up the limitations of Allen’s writing. ‘We spent a lot of time characterising,’ Lee tells me, particularly the character of Barbara, apt to become a token female part. They explain how they began with a Stanislavskian approach, working up a trajectory for their characters that incorporated both past experiences and future goals. Though one might think this somewhat superfluous for a comedy, the richness of character is immediately apparent in rehearsal, Sutcliffe and Boyer striking up a quick dialogue almost imperceptibly as Lee enthuses over the promotional videos he’s recently made.

As ‘cartoonish’ and ‘zany’ as Riverside Drive might be, then, its ‘madness’, Boyer admits, is counterbalanced by a ‘surreal dark edge’, the bitter aftertaste of despair and disillusionment that is the hallmark of Woody Allen’s oeuvre. Its pretensions to light-hearted fun belie the fact that Riverside Drive is no walk in the park. Nor would Rattigan and Lee have wanted it to be. It is this generic eccentricity, this finely-held tension between the fully comic or tragic, that seems to excite and challenge these budding directors, for whom experimentalism is the raison d’être. And as Sutcliffe’s face begins to turn purple in a grinning Boyer’s headlock, I feel their gamble might just be about to pay off.