While most people were still eating up the leftovers from their Christmas dinner, or wondering how to get refunds on presents they didn’t really want, playwright David K. O’Hara, director James Savin, and actor Jacquie Crago were closeted in a house in Jericho working through the text of a brand new play.

“It’s all about the difference between sitting in your room and writing, and the practicalities of putting a play in a performance space and making it accessible and riveting for an audience,” as Jacquie put it.

David is fairly new to the playwriting business: his first play, The Upstairs Room, was produced at the Burton Taylor Studio last July, and was described as “a remarkably confident piece of writing” by Simon Collings in his Oxford Times review. His new play, Now Until the Hour, tells the story of Mary, who, in David’s words, “is equally as prone to flights of imagination as she is to the ghosts of her past. Think Julie Walters meets Krapp’s Last Tape.”

As we talked, David added: “It’s not a monologue because there are other things going on, it’s not just a woman explaining her biography. It’s someone caught in a moment who is interacting with the audience. So it’s immersive, we’re there and go on a journey with her.”

Although he normally works at the Oxford School of Drama, director James Savin is also quite new to theatre directing, and he has been looking around Oxford for a performance venue that hasn’t been widely used for drama before. He’s picked the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building at St Hilda’s College. The space fits the bill precisely, he told me.

“The audience is going to be set out in an arc, almost as if they are on three sides of the performer — we’re not putting Now Until the Hour up there on a stage, and creating a barrier. I like the immediacy, that’s why I am interested in producing plays — my work at the Oxford School of Drama is very much about teaching acting to a film or television camera rather than a live audience.”

Charged with bringing Now Until the Hour off the printed page is Jacquie Crago. Jacquie’s main career is in voice coaching, so, I asked her, is this a case of practising what she preaches?

“I was an actor for 18 years, working fairly consistently in rep, before my family came along. After that I went back to voice coaching, which is where I actually started, at the Royal Scottish Academy.

“But I’ve always kept the performance side going: it’s vital to keep practising what you preach – I’m working on War Horse with a lot of young actors at the moment, and they’re not used to filling a 1,000-seat theatre.

As David, James and Jacquie returned to their rehearsal, I wondered how much rewriting had been going on. Amid much laughter, Jacquie replied: “I hope David doesn’t mind me saying this, but he comes from across the Atlantic, so we’ve had to change one or two phrases into something more English. Mary Jane shoes, for instance: there was a wonderful moment when I cried: ‘What?’ So they’ve become ‘black slip-on shoes’, which is far less interesting.”

Now Until the Hour is at the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building on January 17, 18, 19 and 21. Tickets and full details are available from Tickets Oxford.