To die, as Peter Pan observed, would be an awfully big adventure, and it’s one which is almost but not quite covered in Nina Raine’s new play. Its main subject, however, is the biggest adventure of all, birth. Or, if you like, existence itself. As late-thirties Anna searches among her exes and acquaintances for a baby-father, and then considers fertilisation by sperm donor, we hear virtually every character (of whom there are well over a dozen) engage in fashioning their own narrative of who they are, what they want, where they’re going.

Raine is a skilled, intelligent and sensitive writer, and of late also an adroit director of her own work. It’s something of a surprise, then, that Stories adds up to less than the sum of its parts. The quest-for-conception narrative is not as compelling or freighted with significance as it might be, and the we-tell-our-own-stories theme verges on truism. (How often have my reviews described figures spinning their own narratives? The fact that several of Raine’s characters including Anna are either writers of some kind or involved in drama underlines the point almost wherever you look.)

Claudie Blakley shows admirable restraint as Anna is disappointed time and again by various candidates. The contrast between Anna and the assorted men, however, is too unsubtle. Sam Troughton, who plays half a dozen roles, shows his versatility to an extreme degree, turning on a sixpence from a painfully hipster club DJ to a precious actor offering Anna China tea which “I got... when I was filming with Woody”, but they’re pretty much all cartoons. This could in theory be due to a director taking too easy a tack with the writing, but since director and writer are one and the same in this case that’s not an option.

In each incarnation, Raine is alert to injecting humour to stave off excessive earnestness, but she proves over-eager and ends up trivialising matters. Almost all the assorted men are there simply to make the same point about solipsism over and over again, and there is never enough of a gear change to contrast the broad comedy of these instances with the more serious drama of Anna narrating her own stories to family and friends, in particular telling true bedtime stories to the young daughter of the couple with whom she’s staying. Nor does Raine deal clearly with the latter phase in which this girl intrudes into Anna’s scenes, asking questions of her own: is she a surrogate? An unsatisfied listener? A fresh perspective? How does her consumption of the stories threaten to transform into agency within them?

None of this is to suggest that the work of Raine and her company is poor. This is a flawed play and production, not a bad one. Nevertheless, it feels like more of a miss than we are accustomed to from this thoughtful and talented writer. In trying too hard both to live up to and to play down the heft of her subject, she falls between two stools.

Written for the Financial Times.