It’s the bane of the theatre critic. The clock’s about to tick midnight and the electronic page is still blank. God. This is all I need. A play that makes you think. The worst kind. One glass of red too many at the post-theatrical booze ‘n’ schmooze (come to think of it, the latter is every bit as theatrical), a couple of stiff black coffees to get the mind into gear, and a play that asks questions. Jesus. Seinfeld was about nothing. But Like A Fishbone is about something. But what?

If you’re going to enjoy this play — a co-production between the Sydney Theatre Company and Griffith Theatre Company as part of STC’s Next Stage season — you’re going to have to get a little wet yourself. For much of it, you’re liable to feel blind.

But the fog clears. Things emerge. Questions mostly. And the keys to the metaphors. No one will hand them to you. You’ll have to rummage below the cushions of language; the unnaturally overlapping dialogue. You’ll have to connect all the disconnects between the two key characters: the architect and the grieving mother; who are, probably, one and the same.

Anthony Weight (the writer) has weighty things on his mind. He looked out his hotel window, in New York, at Ground Zero. He wondered what the cold, glib rationalism of Hitchens and Dawkins would do in consolation for a grieving mother who needs an illusion to survive. Are murderers victims? Children? Of God?

Tim Maddock has done a fine job indeed in directing two very intense, visceral, efficacious principal performances, from Marta Dusseldorp and Anita Hegh. Dusseldorp, especially, is so much an embodiment of self-doubt and neurosis that I feel its cloying contagion (it doesn’t take much) just thinking about it.

Are you a lady? Are you a human being? Like A Fishbone will stick in your throat for a a little while after you see it.

The details: Like A Fishbone plays Wharf 1, Sydney Theatre until August 7. Tickets on the STC website. (Read the full review at Curtain Call.)