‘Tell me your favourite story’, Daniel demands of his new friend Ava at one crucial point in Moments. I admire how this production shares that commitment to the value of simple, impulsive storytelling. There’s something exciting about packing an audience into the Larkum Studio (why is it so rarely used?) to confront them with a new play.

And Hellie Cranney knows how to tell a story: the plot’s well-shaped, she’s got a nice ear for softly comic exchanges, and, as in her 24-hour play, she’s great at generating humour from tactlessness. The actors have clearly embraced the text wholeheartedly. Andreea Tudose performs Ava’s moments of quiet sarcasm especially well; Harry Baker’s Daniel is naive and charming throughout, but then manages a convincing micro-collapse in his final scenes.

I’m not as satisfied, however, that Cranney’s yet found an original story worth telling. It’s interesting to write a play about ‘who you tell your stories to and how that affects you’, but such a principle lies behind character interaction in most plays anyway, and it means that neither Ava’s relationship with her boss nor Daniel’s kidney donation ever quite gain the full limelight they deserve.

The play also still bears distracting signs of the writing workshop context in which it was developed. Many invented character details, like Ava’s Judaism, add very little; among many scenes in which the characters address an interlocutor offstage, some are great – particularly one where it’s unclear whether the unseen character’s even conscious – but others sound like extended character exercises, which Tudose in particular struggles to make credible.

The production fits the Larkum well: the scattering of props at the fringes of the stage until they come into use is a nice reflection of the ‘small world’ of the play, in which Ava and Daniel must expose themselves to each other. Sadly, this message is undercut by endless blackouts, many of which only seem to exist to move a table by five feet. I wish that Matt Clayton had risked swifter, continuous staging to play against, rather than telegraph, Cranney’s scene structure. (It’s a shame, because the striking handling of scene-change was what I enjoyed most in Clayton’s Beckett offering last term.)

But Clayton and Cranney still have plenty of time left to take risks – before then, it’s worth a trip to the ADC, so you can say that you saw them here first.