Always criticising the production not the play is a principle I sign up to and I’ve publicly advocated it – but this week, Edna St Vincent Millay’s presented me with a challenge. Aria da Capo is crucially flawed: the final ‘da capo’ scene, which this production’s website and programme notes draw so much attention to, refuses to really explore the situation that’s been established, in favour of ending the play immediately with a clichéd absurdist device.

Having said that, my frustration partly originated in Charlie Risius’s direction. I was looking forward to a further exploration of the first scene's two characters, so I could get a sense of who they were from how they’d changed – and I just hadn’t got that from the opening scene. Matt Clayton and Freddie Poulton were never less than engaging as Pierrot and Columbine, but oscillated between moments when their movement and voice were stylised and controlled, and moments which seemed less considered. This scene’s most striking bits seemed to come from additions to the script, rather than close attention to it: an innovative use of modern ketchup and mustard bottles and a smashing of the fourth wall by Clayton.

The aria’s B-movement, by contrast, was rather lovely. It achieved what the first scene conspicuously hadn’t: through a series of well-choreographed opening gestures, Sam Curry and Jennie King built up a clear idiom for their performance, which gradually broke down in a way that helped to tell a story. The political resonances of that story, in which two shepherds divide up their field with disastrous consequences, aren’t subtle, and King in particular found a nicely-judged tone for it, somewhere between portentousness and knowingness.  The scene reached a delightfully off-kilter climax, which had the effect of moving me when I recognised that it shouldn’t. By this point, the production had just about won me over, and the first scene was almost redeemed by its contrast with the second – but, as my plus-one said as we left, it never quite managed to turn this lack of synthesis into a virtue.    

This production offers little beyond its novelty value, but novelty is still valuable. It’s a play that could only really be staged as a short-run lateshow like this, and represents the kind of risk that the ADC should take more often. This particular experiment achieves the odd feat of being simultaneously unsatisfying and charming.