Let’s talk about Found111. The programme certainly wants to: it contains articles from the producer, the director and the designer, all about working in the venue, and nothing about the production we’re supposedly there to see. From all this kerfuffle, it would seem that this venue in the garret of what used to be Central St Martin’s school of art is unique in the history of pop-up ventures for both the intensity of its character and the success of the work staged here. I begin to feel that I’m missing the point for having paid some attention to the show.

What, the show? Oh, it’s Sam Shepard’s hour-long meditation on love/hate, which he jazzes up a little by making his central couple Eddie and May half-siblings and giving them periodic exchanges with their father, who remains constantly onstage as a ghost-cum-memory-cum-witness to the goings-on between them and May’s new man.

And I have to admit it works very well in this space. Ben Stones emphasises the natural dilapidation by laying the floor with black gravel... or is it nutty slack? Either way, hardly Mojave desert sand, but it works. (Even here, he doesn’t miss a branding trick: the door of the motel room in which the action takes place carries the number 111.) Edward Lewis’s sound design is subtle yet pervasive: two or three times I was uncertain whether particular effects were Lewis’s work or just ambient noise from the Charing Cross Road outside.

This is director Simon Evans’ third production here, so he’s plainly got the measure of the place by now. He has a fine foil in Adam Rothenberg, who almost effortlessly dominates the studio space, even when all but invisible from row C because he’s playing an entire scene flat on his back. Lydia Wilson mops the floor with the last couple of Mays I’ve seen... which, given that they were Juliette Lewis and Sadie Frost, is some compliment. As the Old Man, Joe McGann is an impressive Arizona rock formation through which the desert wind periodically moans. And, of course, the Found marque will inescapably continue, no doubt hitting all kinds of new and unprecedented highs, et cetera.

Written for the Financial Times.