Despite the famous warning of the 1994 film adaptation's tagline, 'whichever side you take, you're wrong', audience members haven't stopped trying, and the divisiveness of Oleanna has now become so notorious that during its 2009 Broadway run, videos of audience members' responses to the question, 'whose side are you on' were uploaded to its youtube channel. David Mamet has claimed that Carol and John, the play's two characters, are 'saying something absolutely true at every moment' and yet this leads to the pair being completely at odds, clutching at two discrete 'truths', and I was excited to gauge whether an audience composed primarily of students would be swayed by one character or another, or whether it would just seem like another gimmick, a variation on a whodunnit, with red herrings at every turn.

'She's a bitch', asserted the two girls behind me at the end of the play, but it was noticeably often the pretension of John's academic jargon ('the virtual warehousing of the young', his preference for 'paradigm' over 'model') that cued the biggest laughs. Audience support at this level lent Carol's discovery of a jargon of anti-jargon - one she finds validated in her 'group' - a particularly interesting edge when the rhetoric of her monologues begins to gain illocutionary force. It is clear that Emma Hall and the actors have mined the text to bring together a starkly original yet nuanced reading of these characters.

Both performances get increasingly multi-faceted the more I think about them. Charlie Parham plays John as a teacher who is not so much unlikeable as chronically insensitive; despite his theory that 'it's my job to provoke you', he is distant, glib and fatally self-focused in his attempts to teach Carol. The tricky double whammy of quick-fire exchange and the American accent requirement - well met, with only the occasional end-line slip into English English – was made yet more difficult by the frequency with which the pair interrupt each other. Charlotte Hamblin's Carol was consistent in her volatility; right from the beginning her nervous energy seems to be on the brink of finding something more explosive on which to expend itself.

The Corpus Playrooms and claustrophobia go hand in hand, and the set of this two-hander passed well as a supervisor's room (the 'private' sign on the door to another room was a nice detail). But my bugbear with this production is the excessive amount of blocking; right from the get-go the characters got up and sat down and flailed all over the room, often for no apparent reason. Apart from anything else, I just can't imagine a supervision where a student would make a point while pacing around the room, even while upset. The interaction between the pair was compelling enough as it was, and more minimal movement would have made that interaction even more effective.

I've left a lot unwritten about this production, primarily because it's difficult to write about two-thirds of it without giving away the plot. But even if someone has already pelted you with plot spoilers, this production is worth seeing if just for the heated discussion you'll have afterwards. The fact that I left the Corpus Playrooms feeling as if I understood Oleanna both infinitely more and infinitely less is a mark of this production's success; it does a play that revels in unresolved ambiguity justice.