Original student writing in Cambridge is variable: many aspire to produce groundbreaking creative work, but each year only a few works of prose, poetry and drama really stand out. After seeing a sneak preview of Will Hutton and Jamie Rycroft’s Living Quarters in rehearsal, I am excited to say that I saw an aperçu of the kind of student drama that can more than hold its own with plays performed at the National.

This year’s winner of the RSC / Marlowe Society ‘Other Prize’, Living Quarters is built on the type of plot one would find in a thriller. So, unsurprisingly, Will is clear that the simple purpose of entertaining the audience was at the centre of their vision: he says that, throughout the process, “Jamie and I were thinking: what would be a fun way for people to spend an hour in the theatre”; and Jamie concurs – “it’s entertainment, foremost”.

Yet the grandeur of the part of the play I saw stems from its combination of this thriller-like quality (I was rapt with the desire to find out what happens next) and dialogue that has nothing in common with the sad excuses for lines in the plethora of cheap thrillers that litter the West End. Both writers speak about how they “like postmodernism a lot”, and about how “recurring themes” of literary significance shone through during the writing process. Will states that “the name [Thomas] Pynchon came up” a great deal between him and Jamie during the writing process, and indeed the dialogue has that aspect of defamiliarising surrealism that is at the heart of the great American postmodernist Pynchon’s work.

And just as Pynchon’s zany, comic narratives entertain the reader at the same time as exploring myriad socio-political themes, the surreal humour in Will and Jamie’s lines explores fundamental moral questions. Most of the dark comedy stems from the discord between the seeming banality of the discussion and the broader context of the bewildering, dire circumstances in which the characters have found themselves. As Jamie points out, “the play starts off in a funny way” and as it develops “there are still funny moments in it” – but inextricably bound with this dark comedy is the exploration of moral themes. “Every character is an arsehole in some way,” Jamie asserts. In ways that vary between them, they all exhibit “very selfish and morally wrong” behaviour in response to extreme events. But the crux of this issue is that when the characters show this most clearly, the two writers were thinking: “Would I do the same thing in the circumstances?” The disquieting answer – one which will likely disquiet the audience when they ask themselves the same question – was in several cases “yes”.

All this shows a strong vision by the two writers, who are also co-directing Living Quarters. However, both are committed to theatre as a collaborative medium that inevitably brings a multitude of voices into the creative process. Jamie opines that in theatre just one writer-director is “too imposing”, but in working with Will and his markedly different artistic approach, the development of the play between the two of them was “extremely enriching creatively”. Not only that, as directors as well as writers, Will and Jamie made it clear to the actors that they had free rein to develop their own roles. “Any external voice is productive”, Will puts it, and from the rehearsal it was evident that the actors’ conceptions of their characters are at the core of the play that the audience will see at the ADC. In this process, “words escape from you”, Jamie says – but when actors are building on the text to make the performances their own, that can only be a good thing.

Living Quarters opens tomorrow night, and will be on until the 7th. Go not just because it shows the great promise both writers have for years to come, but also because it exhibits the rare quality present in the plays of England’s greatest living dramatist, Tom Stoppard: the combination of dazzlingly clever linguistic wit with serious exploration of some of the foremost concerns at the heart of the human condition.