A dishevelled playwright sits at a rickety desk in his jammy-bottoms and a rumpled blazer, grinding a fist into his hair and trying to write a whodunnit. Shiny red apples dot the surfaces of a sparsely-furnished stage and dangle from the ceiling, amid empty, upturned drinking vessels.

The playwright gets up, mad-eyed and desperate, takes a bite from the apple and begins to write – or rather, to direct – seizing props and conjuring characters (played by the rest of an adept cast) to perform his bidding, freezing the action when the players' motivation comes unstuck, which is frequently. The traditional preoccupations of a penniless hack – fame, fortune and artistic integrity – seem to be the last things on his mind. Both play and plot are determinedly, even aggressively unoriginal: a rapacious actress (somewhat reminiscent of Margo Channing) seduces her understudy's husband at a party, and is shot to death during a power cut (it has to be something "contrived and clunky" nods the playwright to himself, approvingly). It quickly emerges that something far greater is at stake here than the simple completion of a play, as the characters begin interfering in the creative process and the playwright himself becomes a character in the drama.

Maria Czepiel's Playwright is a tight, enjoyable 30-minute mindworm, selected alongside three other pieces as part of the OUDS' New Writing Festival. It's as structurally humble as it is psychologically ambitious, which is ideal for the Burton Taylor, whose meagre contours and blank walls suggest both the claustrophobia and infinite space of the untethered mind. Despite the mannered retro-ness of the play-within-a-play, the overall feel is breezily contemporary. The playwright's introduction of a new character ('she's sassy, sarky and single as the moon') could have been written expressly for the facepalm-inducing ironies of the @femscriptintros era.

Neither script nor staging are shy of laying on the symbolism, but it's the kind of symbolism that offers such breadth of interpretation (apple, anyone?) that almost everything is suggested, and nothing confirmed – a considerable strength. The narrative unfolds in the creases between the conscious and the unconscious: this seems less about the creative process as self-investigation, more about play-acting as a symptom of emotional turmoil – the banal compulsion to re-create that fuels erotic games and nurtures psychopaths.

As easily happens with one-act plays, the ending of Playwright struggles to do justice to the richness of Czepiel's themes. These are knots that don't tie neatly. Overall though, this is very funny, highly intelligent writing that gives its actors lots to work with, even though they're playing cardboard cutouts… a sort of psychofreudian cousin to Noises Off. Thirty minutes well spent.