Anthony Neilson has been watching the greats of German cinema lately. The set-up for his latest play – the production of a dystopian-future film is stalled for want of the right shooting stock – is lifted wholesale from Wim Wenders’ 1982 The State Of Things. Later, when a notoriously difficult actor is drafted in, we’re headlong into Klaus Kinski/Werner Herzog territory.

Neilson, who is known for devising/writing his plays during the rehearsal period, was here I suspect responding to actor Jonjo O’Neill’s infectious enthusiasm for over-the-top characterisation. Strutting around in leather riding boots, declaiming lines such as “I swear it on the lives of my children that I know about”, O’Neill corpsed even himself a couple of times on opening night, never mind his co-stars such as deaf actor Genevieve Barr and Matt Smith.

Smith plays Maxim, the director who constantly postpones the shoot because he is allegedly looking for a particular numinous kind of light in which to shoot, but is obviously suffering from creative block. This makes him the focus of the serious elements of Neilson’s piece. Unfortunately, he cannot enact that focus if it isn’t there in the material. Neilson has in the past traded on the claim that, on entering pre-production for a play, he has no idea what it will be about in terms either of story or themes; in this case, I’m afraid that is all too easy to believe. Time and again, I found myself asking why he had chosen to make this play and no other, and the only answer I could find was those German films.

As presently configured (although it may have changed again by the time you read this), the play contains a fair bit of fun (some of it unfathomable, such as a running gag about characters jumping in surprise at each other’s entrance), and the germ of one or two interesting ideas about authenticity, mostly personified in Tamara Lawrance as an actress who is heartbreaking on camera but almost (though not quite) entirely dispassionate off. Overall, though, this is effectively a first draft. I’d be fascinated to see a season of revised versions of Neilson plays.

Written for the Financial Times.