As we enter Queens’ College’s Fitzpatrick Hall, we become detached from the natural light and noise of chatter trickling in from the outside world, coming into the tiny acting space. This stage is a square lit harshly from above, flanked with chairs like a boxing ring, with one of the performers slowly going through the movements of tai chi while the other reads a newspaper.

We enter a kind of yogic sleep as we enter the room. This deep relaxation technique, in which the yogi becomes hyper-aware of their own body, and detaches themselves from the outside world in order to reach a state of inward reflection on mind and body, is what I could perhaps best liken The Day Room to.

However, this doesn’t mean you should think this play is a comfortable experience. On the contrary, our hyper-awareness of our own presence, and our extreme proximity to the actors is deeply unsettling. During the interval, when the audience is asked to vacate the auditorium, most audience and crew members congregate outside. As they smoke, chat, drink water, go into the bathrooms, one can’t escape the feeling that this is all part of the performance too, that we too are members of the cast, creating and participating in the space which creates a play. After all, if a tree falls in the ADC and there’s nobody there to hear it…

This may all sound really pretentious, but the beauty of Don Delillo’s writing and the beauty of the way in which this rarely performed play has been approached is that The Day Room is so self-conscious, and so concerned with artifice and pretence, that it’s probably the least pretentious piece of theatre to play in Cambridge for a long time.

"Both beautifully comedic and hauntingly menacing "

The Day Room is comprised of two linked, yet distinct, halves. In the first half, Harry Brannan and Arthur Barnard are two hospital patients, visited by an increasingly bizarre stream of visitors, doctors and nurses, who may or may not be from the mysterious ‘Day Room’, situated in the hospital’s Arno Klein wing. Both Barnard and Brannan are hilarious here and wonderful at drawing in the audience, in a scene where we could easily become detached and lose sympathy for the characters whom we see on stage. Ciaran Walsh and Charlotte Guerry also particularly shine here, bringing both beautifully comedic and hauntingly menacing presences to the stage.

In the second half of the play, Maya Achan and Andrew Carey are a couple, avidly searching for the incredibly elusive Arno Klein theatre troupe. Various characters pass through their motel room in a manner similar to the first half of the play, while in the corner a straightjacketed Barnard plays a television. Tom Reed is hilarious here as the motel clerk, and Achan is brilliant at tapping into the audience’s feelings of curiosity about the mysterious world of the play, taking these feelings and turning them into a kind of hysterical frustration.

"An incredibly tantalising prospect for both characters and audience"

At the end of this half, starved of answers about who Arno Klein is, and where and what the Day Room is, we realise that both actors and audience (and, we might say, Delillo too) are striving for the same answers. This is exemplified in the concept of the Day Room itself. This is a space never seen on stage, which hangs precipitously in time and space, resisting definition and location, but presenting an incredibly tantalising prospect for both characters and audience.

One of only four plays written by Don Delillo, who is referred to in publicity for this production as ‘the greatest writer of our age’, The Day Room is surprisingly rarely produced. The directorial and production team of Will Maclean, Ciaran Walsh, Eliza Bacon, Eleanor Burke and William Gore have presented a really unified vision here, which seems to affirm Delillo’s vision for this play and his visual and linguistic aesthetic in other works.

Review: Ghostwritten

The Day Room must surely be one of the best and most fascinating shows the Cambridge drama scene has on offer this term, and is a icily beautiful metatheatrical gem