Heard about the bloke who walked into a pub and started performing a play? The bloke is actor Thomas Morrison and the play he is giving us is Honest. This is a new work by Northampton-born DC Moore, whose first piece for the theatre, Alaska, was premiered at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 2007 and won him the inaugural Tom Erhardt Award for promising new playwrights. Another contribution to the Royal&Derngate’s Addicted to You season, it is being staged at the pub round the corner – a very stylish establishment – before the curtain goes up on My Zinc Bed at the Royal&Derngate.

Honest is a 45-minute monologue delivered by a sharp-suited character called Dave (whom one suspects is modelled in part on the writer). It begins in uncompromising style when, half-finished pint in hand, he sits down among us and declares: “I think I am a bit of a c***, to be honest.” What he has done, initially, is to tell the unpalatable truth – or at any rate not tell a diplomatic fib – about a piece of artwork produced by his schoolboy nephew Ben. “Why couldn’t I just have said that it was better than pictures I produced at his age?” he muses.

Dave, it transpires, is quite addicted – there’s that word again – to speaking the truth. Generally, he keeps his mouth buttoned when he’s engaged in his civil service job at the Department of Industrial and Social Affairs in London. It is in the Strategic and Tactical Development Team – known, he says, as the STD. . .T. This abbreviation – with the last-letter always added as if an afterthought – is uttered often and becomes strangely funnier each time it is said, though whether we must thank Mr Morrison, Mr Moore or director Mike Bartlett for this I am not sure.

Trouble erupts, though, after a party for a colleague, which begins with Bollinger in paper cups at the office, carries on with lager and shots – plus for Dave a bottle of merlot – at a cheapo pub, and winds up at a club playing “awful, awful” 1980s music. He tells his loathed boss Ben the story of his life in the loo, before embarking on a drink-drenched odyssey across London to visit “Ben” . . . I thought it was to be the boss again, but was actually the nephew.Is use of the same name deliberately intended to cause confusion?

Rich comic moments sit alongside remarks both moving and serious – concerning the Twin Towers, for instance, and the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell. This is a play worth catching. Until March 13,For booking, call 01604 624811 (www.royalandderngate.co.uk).