For its almost absurdly minimalist name and premise (four strangers participate in an amateur acting class; drama ensues), Circle Mirror Transformation tunes into a wonderful polyphony of emotional experience.

This charming ensemble piece is built almost purely on characterisation, like a 19th-century realist experiment. Marty (Rebecca Gibney), the acting instructor, is classically bohemian, from her sweet husky voice to her myriad shawls. Her husband, James (Cameron Daddo), is a little harder to decipher, a renegade older man who used to be a revolutionary. Theresa (Jessie Lawrence) and Schultz (Nicholas Brown) are at once recognisable as millennial spoofs, the former touting perma-pilates garb, the latter a klutzy carpenter played with impressive slapstick physicality. And my favourite, Lauren (Ahunim Abebe)—the most naturalistically written and embodied, a close-to-heart high schooler, shy and ironic but later wonderfully witty, who harbours dreams of being an actor.

Though most of the play was anchored in a gentle naturalism, the third act ushered in an uneasy feeling that the delightfully character-driven story was lurching into conflict with a superimposed plot. In the final climax, the ensemble sits in a circle and writes a “secret they’ve never told anyone else” on slips of paper. These—in a frustratingly predictable way—turn out to be sensational, relationship-breaking ‘secrets’, which the audience has been clued into throughout the play. Marty reveals a horrific childhood trauma that’s played for shock and left unexplored; James lets loose his adulterous love for Theresa in a singularly bombast and unrealistic moment; Schultz is again mined for comic relief, misspelling his secret and confessing his addiction to internet pornography, the cherry on top of a Frankensteinian hodgepodge of millennial stereotypes. Chekhov’s gun goes off and off and off, long after any meaningful target has dropped well and dead.

The play travels along the trajectory of Plath’s fig tree: a bright young thing, seductive in its easy subtlety, but curdles as it grows, sucked into the formal constraints that hang heavy over it like April fog. Schultz is straitjacketed into a sitcom ass, as if true bohemians died with the aging of Gen X; short-story sensationalism overwhelms the denouement, bringing an otherwise subtle, gently explorative play to an unreasonably histrionic end.

Despite the ending, Circle Mirror Transformation is a riveting and capacious experience. Its strengths lie in its self-reflexivity, in the delightful inception of actors pretending to be actors. Particularly striking are scenes of layered pretense, as when James (pretending to be Theresa’s ex) fulfills the part of an emotionally abusive partner to Lauren (embodying Theresa), who tries to refute his manipulative tactics in a manner too healthy and detached for Theresa who, enraptured by James’ theatrical reenactment, is pulled earnestly and stridently into the argument, so thick with emotion it’s almost tangible.

The web of metatheatricality is weaved so effortlessly by the actors, easing the audience from one melodrama to another, all the while deepening our relations with each character. It’s a clever ensemble piece, at its best when slow, subtle, and meandering.