Beginning Middle End is the latest project from Oliver Rees, the perennial matchmaker and ‘ideas man’ from Jesus College behind last year’s Anonymous Pigeon and Library Whispers. His mission is to create meaningful connections in Cambridge - an ambitious undertaking.

The Beginning of the project invited shy lovers to anonymously declare their passions by SMS via Rees’s website; the Middle saw 500 roses delivered to admired students’ pigeon holes; and the End is the play at Corpus, which describes itself as ‘a showcase of real life love stories and relationships’. Every moment in the show is based on a real-life experience submitted anonymously to Rees before being fleshed out by the actors and directors. This is expertly done: with little more than two chairs and a screen, the six actors present in nine scenes the inception, development and culmination of three relationships.

The first couple, Alice (Sophie Crawford) and Dominic (Harry Carr), are on a blind date. It isn’t a promising start: Alice almost chokes on the leggera pizza Dominic has officiously taught her to pronounce properly. Carr and Crawford work brilliantly together: he is loquacious, prattling on about how he’s going to Oxford (the impending interview is just a formality), while she is taciturn, bringing him down to earth. When we next see them Alice is unsuccessfully trying to gain Dominic’s attention by gasping interestedly over her Cosmo article on men’s sexual secrets, while Dominic’s eyes remain riveted to his laptop screen - ostensibly on his essay on Foucault. When Alice asks to have a look she is unconvincingly informed that her French won’t be up to it. The emergence of their incompatibilities, sexual and intellectual, is tightly constructed and cleverly directed by Natasha Moules and Hatty Carman.

The next pair, directed by Amrou Al-Kadhi and Check Warner, exhibit a similar academic inequality: though Izzy (Rozzi Nicholson-Lailey) and Sam (Jack Parlett) bond over how terribly Izzy’s Oxford interview went, it isn’t a bond that can last. Their Middle scene makes effective use of the double-fronted Corpus space, with each character facing a different audience, failing to communicate with each other via an increasingly unreliable Skype connection. Their relationship is subtly acted and uncomfortably believable.

Lisa (Deli Segal) and Jack (Lewis Owen) comprise the final couple. Jack is an ageing English don; Lisa is his American PhD student. Jack is very interested in Lisa’s thesis on Donne, letter writing and the mingling of souls. He paces his office opining on the wonder of human contact, murmuring about the significance of the touch of a hand, the meeting of eyes, the caress of the lover’s body... Lisa shrinks in her chair and tries to steer their conversation back to her studies. Deli Segal is persuasive as the unwillingly victim of Jack’s desires (and her Chicago accent never wavers), while Lewis Owen plays the lecherous and unbalanced professor, convinced that Lisa has led him on, with conviction. The direction by Celine Lowenthal and Maddie Dunnigan works well, with the couple's positioning on stage conveying the attractions, repulsions and power struggles of their relationship.

Academic men get a bad press in this play: we are presented with a prurient professor, an insensitive Oxford student and an obnoxious Oxford interviewee. All three women are patronised as their intellectual inferiors: Dominic scorns Alice’s decision to apply to Bristol (‘party girl?’); Jack is too busy regaling Lisa with hilarious stories of how his mate’s plate landed on high table in formal hall and it was the funniest thing ever to remember to ask how her essay went up in Edinburgh; and Jack is more interested in Lisa’s physique than her thesis.

For a play which concludes with the wish to create ‘new chapters’ for its audience, Beginning Middle End gives a worrying portrayal of the kinds of love possible in the university environment. If relationships are so easy to create and Rees is so sanguine about his audience’s chances of finding love after the show, it is unfitting that all the relationships in his play have to End.