Michell’s new play Plank opens fluently, with all the verve and slyness of an Ayckbourn social comedy. The setting is a kitschy Midlands café with one table already occupied by two old men, George and Percy, who quibble over the weather with almost senile pedantry. The humbugs engage in a brilliantly brittle bout of repartee: words collide and contort, small talk verges on the philosophical, mundanity primed to detonate into the bizarre.

The stage is gradually filled by various caricatured figures, all wrangling with some personal trauma, all dressed in luridly chintzy, clashing prints. A careworn expectant mother meets with her posh totty friend, a nautically clad couple quibbles over the provenance of chai lattes, siblings serenade a ‘perfect day’. As we’d expect with the sensitive Michell, there is more to this domestic vignette than the ritualized conventions of chitchat and gesture: as the play progresses, each individual lays their broken self on the laminated table for all too see and judge.

Simon, the suave, irascible boyfriend (played by Laurens Macklon) breaks up with the fragile Linda as, to follow the old cliché, he’s servicing his Personal Assistant. He does so in public, he coldly admits, since ‘I didn’t think you’d make such a scene’. The stricken Linda is reduced to squeaky social platitudes: ‘that’s a nice name,’ she says of the new mistress. Keeping up Appearances never rang so true, nor so sonorously.

The other hubs of familiar discourse are harder to penetrate. It’s unclear whether Philippa, played with a muted pathos by Emily Parton, is downing umbrella drinks out of defiance or grief - whether Fiona’s suggestion of baby names saddens her as she has lost a child or whether she merely flinches at the prospect of maternity. The strangest gathering, however, is that of Marcus, Tim, and Abigail – a group of ambiguously related diners, arguing over the mechanics of mourning: Marcus, a fidgety youth, has a lofty, almost quixotic, view of loss unreciprocated by his stolid relatives. George and Percy look wryly on, as the fireworks of strained relations crackle around them.

Indeed, it is only when an act of grave significance occurs that all four, warring tables converge, their individual fears all synthesized by one single, dull thud. This is perhaps the most affecting moment of the play, and one that director Ami Jones orchestrates well: after the kinetic din of social interchange comes bewildered silence and the apprehension of their one common trait – mortality. It is here that the mousey Linda comes into her own, Lucy Farrett beautifully navigating her character from parodic neurosis to genuine, dumbfounded grief. Other characters fall short of such a delicate reaction - Tim and Abigail (played by Adam Smith and Haxie Meyers-Belkin) appear rigid and unintentionally awkward, superimposed on a far more nuanced backdrop. So too does Kitty Norman’s Fiona, for all her self-protective brashness, fail to do justice to the seamlessness of Michell’s script: you can see her mind whirring, anticipating each line, rather than savoring her character. This is, arguably, the greatest flaw of a play which ultimately fails to deliver the promised goods.

Michell’s script is littered with subtleties which plumb the depths beneath the characters’ ‘carry on’ camaraderie, the truisms parroted throughout forming a lexicon of self-preservation. The cast, sadly, cannot as a whole sustain this two-tiered, yet fluid, approach to the dialogue, separating the inner self and public body into two, overly dramatized personas, rather than a composite whole. The saving graces, luckily, are figures such as Farret, and the wonderfully punctilious comedy duo of Oliver Marsh and Stephen Bermingham (playing George and Percy, respectively) who deliver Michell’s words with a comic timing reminiscent of The Two Ronnies.

As his first solo venture into student theatre writing, Michell shows considerable promise with a moving, carefully poised tale of manners versus morals. The play ends by suggesting that the shallow depths of appearance are all we need - something that this production of the play proves perhaps a little too persuasively.