In 1997, the diptych Blue Heart was one of the first full flowerings of Caryl Churchill’s later, overtly surrealistic period, as she began to find bizarre ways of opening up insight into ordinary – or at any rate plausible – events.

The first of the pair of 35-or-so-minute pieces, Heart's Desire, shows a family waiting for their daughter's return from Australia. Her father, mother and aunt play through the same scene, time and time again, a few seconds at a time, with variations. Some variants appear to be wish-fulfilment on the part of one character or another, as Andy de la Tour and Amelda Brown as the parents take turns exploding in rage at each other; some versions represent a collective attempt to settle on a mutually acceptable compromise account which maintains the myth of a tolerably stable family; some include random intrusions from, for instance, a group of armed paramilitaries or an angry emu. With a more or less definitive version of the daughter's arrival, the play ends in mid-sentence.

In the second piece, Blue Kettle, Derek (Alex Beckett) tells several women they are his mother because he was adopted at birth. The women find ways of "confirming" his story to themselves, while Derek strings them along with the aim of defrauding them, although it seems that the fabulation itself is his primary impulse. At first occasionally, then with increasing frequency, words are replaced seemingly at random with "blue" or "kettle". We find ourselves at first restoring the missing words through the verbal context, then increasingly interpreting the ever sketchier dialogue as a whole (“He’d kettle blue blue the documents”) in the context of body language, mood and already acquired information.

David Mercatali directs this co-production with the Tobacco Factory in Bristol; he shows his characteristically keen sense of exactly what scale of performances sits perfectly within a studio-sized space such as the Orange Tree. One downside of this intimacy is that even the rapid between-scenes resets of Heart’s Desire break the flow, or rather slow the staccato rhythm, of the playlet. Nevertheless, it is a sharp illustration of the way Churchill has turned old-school British theatrical absurdism into a darker form of social and political critique.

Written for the Financial Times.