A few months ago, my older brother picked up my copy of Barrel Organ’s Some People Talk About Violence and began absently flicking through it. He looked up at me.

– What a weird title.

– Not really. Well. Maybe a bit.

– Christ. Why is all the theatre you go to so depressing?

The last three shows I’ve reviewed at Fringe could make up a little triptych of “millennial despair” plays, if you wanted to be really fucking glib. Signals by Footprint Theatre, No One is Coming to Save You by This Noise, and now It’s Alright, Everything’s Okay by Anorak. They all have this tiny seed of fear buried inside their black humour, layered under their absurdist-adjacent, post-Attempts on Her Life duologues. I think it’s maybe that seed that’s ignored by (older, paler, staler) critics who review them, who just see the anger. And that’s the most interesting thing for me – the actual, punch-you-in-the-gut type of terror that these companies feel they can only address if they couch it first in words that are spikey, that push you away and laugh bitterly.

It’s Alright”¦ really feels like this company’s debut show – like all the ideas, all the things that make Anorak scared or angry or horrified felt too essential to be scrapped. These two women – one more tentative and flighty, the other confident to the point of cruelty – they reassure each other, chastise each other, discuss abstracted ideas of a society that looks something like our own. It’s never confirmed that it is our own, of course – there’s a deliberate abstraction, a deliberate distancing, a feeling that if we get too close to it then we’ll end up drowning.

And there’s not quite enough build up for the inevitable implosion at the piece’s centre. They’re both too stuck in their ruts of either fear (expressed through anxiety) or fear (expressed through anger) respectively to develop into something more than a contemporary absurdist mouthpiece. As sharp as the initial duologues are, they start with the energy of a nervous rabbit on cold brew coffee and can’t really go any higher from there. It overwhelms, and then it numbs. There’s so much stuff in there – climate change, postcolonialism, civic responsibility, an apocalyptic dystopia – but it deserves to breathe. To take it slower.

It’s at its best when it’s at its quietest, in the second half. The frequent blackouts remind me of A Girl in School Uniform (Walks Into a Bar). Time in both plays goes a little blurry, a little stretchy. The dynamics shift and ease out like muscles stretching and these women become more human the further they get from civilisation. There’s a fucking hysterical bit involving an arm that made me bellow like a seal. When James Nash situates us more, makes us more aware of place, the play breathes a little easier, trusts itself a little more. It’s the sadness, the silences in these types of plays that always gets me. The tremble of a woman’s voice in the dark, the vice-grip of a hand on someone’s shoulder – the flicker in someone’s eyes as they try to convince themselves that, in the end, actually, they might all be okay.

It’s Alright, Everything’s Okay is on at ZOO venues until 27th August. More info here.