There’s a live rock album from the Seventies whose provisional title prior to release was Lou Reed Talks And Talks And Talks. Why, I wonder, did Laura Eason’s play put me in mind of this titbit? It takes place not in New York but in a snowbound cottage in Michigan and, later, a loft apartment in Chicago; its milieu is not art-rock but contemporary literature, as talented but failed novelist Olivia encounters blogger with serious ambitions Ethan. But there’s no getting away from it: what they do in this two-hander is talk and talk and talk. And, periodically – in fact, in virtually every between-scenes blackout – shag. But mostly talk.

Having tanked on her first attempt as a novelist several years ago, Olivia is phobic about showing her new manuscript to anyone, let alone an agent; Ethan, an Internet celebrity thanks to his semi(?)-autobiographical blog Sex With Strangers, partly encourages her and partly just goes ahead and pushes her work regardless. But which is closer to the “real” Ethan: the sensitive soul who is blown away when Olivia lends him a Marguérite Duras novel, or the online persona who reviews his sexual exploits and whose blog-based book is about to become a lad movie? Can either of them reconcile the contradictions, especially as Olivia finally begins to achieve her deserved success thanks to new-media models of publication?

Can we care? I couldn’t, I’m afraid. If Eason had opened her play up to other characters, or shown the actual occurrence of significant events rather than simply filtering them through duologues, we would engage more easily; as it is, she and director Peter DuBois are so committed to the introspection that it occurs to neither that a British audience (or even a less middle-class American one) might need the abbreviation “FSG” explained as publishers Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Theo James makes a decent fist of Ethan, but Emilia Fox is wasted as Olivia, especially in the first act when her naturally rather singsong vocal cadences have little more to do than whoop question after incredulously parroted question.

Written for the Financial Times.