When reviewing original, student-written plays, it is difficult to strike the right tone. I have a strong urge to award five stars to anyone with the courage, perseverance and confidence to write and direct their own creation and put it up for public viewing, as first-time playwright Fiammetta Luino has done this week. I certainly couldn’t do it, and to review this play from a negative perspective would be mean-spirited and churlish – it is not an overdone Ibsen revival, but something new and original, and for this we should be thankful, and start with a positive attitude. Yet, neither can I ignore the play’s faults, which are in the end, I think, outweighed by its virtues.

The title is well-chosen – it appears massively intellectually ambitious, but in fact conceals something extremely simple; like the mad, pretentious patter of most of the art world-dwelling characters who populate the play. Two artists, Amedeo (Harry Sheehan) and Vincent (Temi Wilkey), vengefully pull an Emperor’s New Clothes trick with a family of modern art dealers, chiefly the screechingly luvvy mother and daughter (Juliet Cameron-Wilson and Kesia Guillery), convincing them of the artistic value of empty space. The author clearly knows her Molière, with his skewering of pretension and hypocrisy, and the chatter about the 'social-political aspect of the vertical lines as a spatial allegory of marriage' (or something) wouldn’t be out of place in a commedia dell’arte lazzi, which are also referenced by the universally-applied buffoon makeup.

The energy and pace of the performers is electric and unflagging from the start. Sheehan and Wilkey positively whirl on to stage, ranting hysterically against their bohemian oppressors, while Guillery and Cameron-Wilson form the most horrific stereotype of arty, Islington types I have seen, faces contorted in faux intellectual appreciation, and eliciting from their vocal chords a terrifying symphony of neighs and coos as they debate whether a Coke can on a plinth can just be replaced by one from the vending machine. Gregorio Curello is a wonderful Italian snake-oil salesman, almost convincing you of the worth of a vegetable pierced with drawing pins. It is the kind of very physical, frenetic, Italianesque theatre that is a shame Cambridge doesn’t see more of.

However, if you’re expecting a nuanced critique of the aesthetics of contemporary art, you’ll be disappointed. I am sad to say the play does not venture much more than 'modern art appreciation can be vacuous and silly', and whilst I occasionally agree, I want my theatre experience to tell me more than accepted pub-wisdom. The play seemed an overlong sketch, with the stereotypes a little too stereotypical to sustain an hour’s plot. The play is fun, and the performers uniformly excellent, but, though it is a shame to say so, this original writing seems a little unoriginal. But I’m just a critic – as the play points out, I probably don’t know what I’m talking about. Go and see for yourself.