For 55 minutes on Tuesday night I watched as two student actors traded insults, threats, jokes and arcane observations about feet, food and sundry forms of wildlife from either side of a bright red door.

Between them, at the rear of the stage, sat Alex Mills, in the manner of an umpire or referee. Since he was both the begetter of the words, as playwright, and the organiser of their delivery, as director, it seemed appropriate that he should supervise the exchanges. Except that his back was turned on the action, a trilby pulled down over his head.

Out Through the In Door was described in the programme as “the bastard of Beckett, Pinter and McDonagh” — Martin, that is — which supplied a fair key to its content. Derivative it may have been, but it also proved occasionally frightening, fitfully funny — with a Pinteresque relish for language shown in such phrases as “various goods and services” — and always intriguing.

“Have you come to kill me?” asked Nick Lyons (pictured left) — as one of the two unnamed characters — early in the drama. He had up till then appeared the cowering victim, with Marc Pacitti the arrogant aggressor. That both spoke in Irish accents suggested we might be in the time of the Troubles. But Pacitti replied: “I wish it were that way round.” Thus was revealed an ambiguity in their relationship that was to continue to the (rather bloody) end.

On the way we learned, inter alia, that armadillos boost their sexual allure by urinating on themselves and “that everyone has a story to tell”.

I regretted that the ones told here lacked (for me at any rate) a certain clarity.

Until Saturday. Box office: 01865 305305 or the website (www.oxfordplayhouse.com).