Annie Baker’s play (of whose New York première production this is essentially a transfer) is set amongst the staff of a small cinema in Massachusetts. One aspect of its concern is the matter of cinema going digital, from actual, physical film to projection from hard-disk files. Yet there’s a keen, and it seems largely unnoticed, irony in a programme note declaring that “Film is time made manifest” when what we’re doing as theatregoers is sharing not just an accurate representation but the same actual time and space as the performers.

However, the digital issue is a by-play to the essence of the piece, which is a portrait of the trio of misfits who crew the Flick (the title comes from the cinema’s name) during the day and clean it at night, when we see them. Sam (Matthew Maher) is an embittered but passive no-hoper living in his parents’ attic, Avery (Jaygann Ayeh) a depressive college dropout and film obsessive, Rose the projectionist (Louisa Krause) an awkward stoner. All three are distinctly shy, hence Sam Gold’s production ekes around two hours of dialogue out to three hours of playing time (plus interval). In one scene, Maher regularly pauses around 15 seconds before each line.

This is, though, the right decision: we need to be drawn into this slo-mo pacing, to feel their time made manifest. Thus we come to appreciate the speed of their lives and the distance between events therein; the most overt expression of anger and jealousy comes when Sam strews the contents of a bag of popcorn all over the side of the auditorium that Avery has to brush up.

In some ways this is a 21st-century, blue-collar American version of Jane Austen’s style of social portraiture which she compared to working on a miniature, “the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush”. Admittedly, “ivory” is pushing it a bit, and the sense of a shared, rigid decorum that must not be breached (least of all by a love triangle) is, if not totally absent, then radically different in nature. It’s an acquired taste, in short, like buttered popcorn.

Written for the Financial Times.