A Caravan Named Desire, Split Infinitive’s new production, which joins the Offbeat Festival fresh off the Brighton Fringe, begins before it begins. As the audience filters into Burton Taylor’s black box studio, Alexander and Helen, the husband-wife team behind writing and directing the piece, stand worried on the stage. They call up directions to their lighting and sound techs. They talk anxiously amongst themselves about a missing actor.

The piece, it transpires, was always written to star Alexander, in fact, we’re told, almost all of it actually happened to him. But the actress he’s meant to enact this two-hander with? She’s nowhere to be seen. This only leaves his wife Helen to arm herself with the script and take up the role of Krystal, the sex worker Alexander’s character Gary becomes involved with.

Alexander, playing himself, explains that Split Infinitive has always been interested in telling stories that explore sex in its many forms. So for their latest piece, he knew he wanted to take a deep dive into the sex work industry. The problem was that Alexander didn’t know anything about the sex work industry. So he invented Gary, a thirty-year-old virgin looking to become more comfortable around women.

And with that, he goes undercover to consult a sex worker about her life, discovering Krystal and her caravan shortly thereafter.

For the first half of this show, I was sceptical and wearied by Alexander’s self-congratulatory attempts at empathy and self-indulgent sexual exploration. Krystal is written as shrewd and blunt, but the characterization is a bit on-the-nose. Look how feisty and formidable she is!, the play seemed to be saying; no one’s a victim here. She’s also profoundly opaque - Alexander’s there to tell her story, but all we get are his own impressions of her, and no real insights into the life she leads. Throughout the piece, Helen interrupts to tell him to stop dithering on.

And then somewhere near the halfway point, these very concerns become the story itself. It turns out Alexander’s idea of ‘consulting’ Krystal doesn’t quite match Helen’s, and we realise maybe we’d been putting too much trust in Alexander’s perspective right from the start. The story becomes an exhilarating portrait of the artist as a blackhole, an ego that sucks every trace of humanity around it - Helen’s, Krystal’s, even the audience’s- into its own orbit, its own story. It’s uneasily brilliant and has some deft commentary on artistic entitlement, exploitation and chauvinism.

The explicitness, or lack thereof, is well-judged as well. The show never aims to shock you, it provokes in a different way. I won’t spoil the ending, only that it involves a clever use of grease paint and audience participation (this sounds like it would be cringe-worthy; it was not).

There were a couple of tonal missteps. At the beginning of the show, Helen announces that she directed it, which undercut some of the tension. We were never allowed to fully believe in the meta-story of which the couple were persuading us. A full blur of fact and fiction would have been more fiercely uncomfortable, but in turn, even more rewarding.

And in the show’s last moments, after the final line is spoken, the play ends on the couple dueting to The Beautiful South’s “A Little Time”, a break-up song with a prevailing tone of exasperated affection. While the lyrics match well with their plot, and both Millingtons are excellent vocalists, the bouncy beat undercuts the pathos the show had so artfully built in the past handful of scenes.

Once again, I was wishing for the show to leave the audience marinating in our discomfort a little more. We would have thanked them for it. However, that said, this is a deeply clever and compelling production that I hope continues to tour long after Offbeat Festival has finished.