A birdwatcher and a model are forced to confront their prejudices about one another in David Halliwell’s off-the-wall comedy A Last Belch for the Great Auk. Reginald Armitage, an ornithologist studying the long extinct Great Auk, sub-lets the flat of model Dymphne Pugh-Gooch while she is in New York. She writes to him to explain she is to return earlier than expected and his imagination is thrown into a frenzy. When we first meet Dymphne it is as a figment of Reg‘s fevered brain. She is unbelievable snooty, spoilt and stupid, a wholly two-dimensional stereotype.

Near the start of the play Reg also makes an appearance in the mind of Dymphne. He is a complete bore whose only joy in life seems to be the lack of pleasure he gets from being outside in the cold waiting for his life’s only excitement, the appearance of a rare bird. Of course these are their preconceived ideas made into physical entities. These crude imagined versions of themselves meet three times and engage in blazing rows before the real characters finally meet. Happily, the actual Reg and Dymphne are infinitely more likeable than their notions of each other, and the pair strike up an odd kind of friendship. But when the real characters fall out, dialogue used by their imagined selves is repeated in their argument.

The alternation of perspective between the real and imaginary was at first slightly confusing but what was happening became clearer as the action progressed. In any case, the piece is well written, clever and laugh out loud funny. It is especially so in the way it authentically reproduces the thoughts of an inexperienced man befuddled by the personal effects of a sophisticated woman. “She has so many pants she could s**t her pants for a year” he says.

Steve Hay is every bit the cardigan-clad Reg, extolling with gusto his views on women, models, frivolity and the joy of birds, in broad Scottish tones. Alexa Brown effortlessly transforms herself from the awful imaginary Dymphne to a sympathetic real Dymphne, who is unpretentious and has the same problems as anyone else. The spirited performances make the production, by Oxford company MakeSpace, a fun and thought-provoking watch.

Halliwell, who lived in Charlbury, was a pioneer of multi-viewpoint drama. He was most famous for Little Malcolm and his Struggle Against the Eunuchs. He died in 2006, after reworking parts of Belch with Hay, who subsequently showed the script to director Sarah Dodd of MakeSpace.