I wanted to start this review by explaining why the newspaper prop used in this production annoyed me. I don’t know whether it was a deliberate attempt to make A Point in a play which resists that sort of thing, or just a rare lapse into lazy anachronistic design, or... But such pedantry would annoy you more than the prop annoyed me. And it would just show up how little there is in this production to get annoyed about.

The production is a master class in using the Playroom effectively. The eponymous waiter’s kept (almost) out of the audience’s eye-line: it therefore comes as the last surprise reveal of an opening section in which George Johnston’s pacing has carefully established the kind of space we’re in. It’s only when he wanders into the aisle to pick up a mysterious envelope that Luka Krsljanin rises, and begins making the underground room his own as well. It’s rare to see the ‘shifty, shifting dynamics’ that the flyer boast so clearly enshrined in blocking.

Such clarity is partly possible because the play’s a two-hander – but it helps to have two such gifted hands. Krsljanin’s posture stays precisely, and menacingly, on the edge of comic; he does an impressive job of silently building up what may, just may, be concealed knowledge of what’s going to happen as the play ends. If I’ve got a criticism, it’s that some of Johnston’s monologues felt rattled off. I recognise the attempt to play against the Pinter-pause cliché but, at 45 minutes, this feels disarmingly brief. I would have liked more time to see Gus explore his situation verbally as well as physically – and perhaps a bit longer on that final tableau.

Credit must go too to the light and sound design: the lighting creeps up on you unnervingly in the silence as the play begins, and the sound of the dumb waiter is first jolting, then wonderfully ominous. Best of all, however, is use of the Playroom’s intimacy. Corpus is the kind of space in where a struck match can hang on the air and, if you’re sitting next to the aisle at the right moment, you can literally smell a character’s fear. This production exploits that, creating exactly the sort of giddily live experience I want from theatre. See, hear and smell it for yourself, and find out why that newspaper annoyed me.