moth of augustSat around a table littered with mugs of tea, discarded flyers and the Fringe programme, three performers while away another afternoon in their squalid Edinburgh flat. It’s a set-up you’ll find in any number of kitchens from Holyrood to Haymarket throughout the month of August, but the decision to put it on stage is as misguided as it is boring.

The Moth of August is a baffling new play written by Bethan Kitchen and presented by Cambridge University Theatre Collective. James (James Dobbyn), Conrad (Conrad Jeffries), and Hannah (Hannah Calascione) are all staying in the same Edinburgh flat. We eavesdrop on their conversations as they come and go, eat biscuits and struggle to salvage some sanity in the face of bad reviews. Before long Claudia (Claudia Grigg-Edo) arrives, an unexpected guest, but her arrival adds little to this slow-moving, insipid production.

The writing deals in something like absurdism, with Kitchen attempting to locate the dull and anticlimactic truth behind supposed eccentricity. She refrains from resolving any of the questions her play raises and, while this leads to a measure of intrigue, the lack of dramaturgical rigidity is ultimately frustrating. In occasional snatches it find something like authenticity, and there’s a good joke about digestive biscuits, but once the intrigue falls away there is little in this meandering mess of play to sustain the interest it had created. The characters have been specifically written for the chosen actors with the intention presumably being that they will play extensions of themselves. But being yourself on stage is easier said than done and many of the performances are curiously forced.

Perhaps the most interesting element of the production is the decision to have the lighting state subtly shift between exchanges, despite the time seemingly remaining unchanged. This disrupts the apparent naturalism of the set-up and hints at an absurdist aesthetic that could have enlivened this otherwise boring production.

The Moth of August is at C nova (Venue 145) until 25 August. For more information and tickets visit the Edinburgh Fringe website.