When you’re staging a play called If We Got Some More Cocaine I Could Show You How I Love You, theatre chitchat is likely to focus on the lengthy title.

“It’s memorable I guess,” director Joel Horwood says when I catch up with him and cast member Robert Kjellgren, “but it is affectionately known to us as simply, “Cocaine”.

Horwood auditioned for a role in a 2019 Sydney production and has been keen to direct it ever since, so after Everyman Theatre director Jarrad West read it in London, he agreed to stage the play, which fits the raison d’être of Everyman.

It’s Irish playwright John O’Donovan’s first play, written as recently as 2016, but his reputation has risen fast and he was earlier this year named the winner of the £10,000 Adopt a Playwright Award, proposed for the honour by London’s Royal Court Theatre.

O’Donovan is originally from the village of Clarecastle in County Clare, but this play is set in the nearby city of Ennis and deals with a certain demographic, steering clear of the normal metropolitan focus of contemporary plays.

Like so many Irish scripts, the 90-minute Cocaine, Horwood says, reveals the national aptitude for brilliant talk, although Kjellgren says it’s full of expletives too so there will be a language warning.

Very simply, two young men, Mikey (Kjellgren) and Casey (Joshua James), have just robbed the local petrol station and are on the run. Naturally, their first thought is to steal some cash from Casey’s mum so they can go out on the town, but with the cops hovering down below, they skedaddle on to the top of the roof, where the rest of the play takes place.

In a strange parallel, Troy’s House, a 1999 play by star Queanbeyan-born playwright Tommy Murphy, was partly set on the roof of Canberra’s Parliament House in the days when you could go up there, as the characters, threatened by a creepy security guard, stared down the barrel of a new millennium.

Kjellgren, a National Institute of Dramatic Art graduate now making his way in the profession, plays 24-year-old Mikey, roughly his own age. While he’s not exactly needy, people have rejected him, so he wants to show Casey off in Essen, the city of more than 25,000 at a gay dance club where they play new remixes of old Irish songs.

In O’Donovan’s plays, Kjellgren says, everybody seems to be getting away from something or somewhere.

Casey, the younger of the two, nearly 19, is an English boy who fled London in the middle of the night with his offstage mum and his stepfather, who’s actually from Ennis but is not well regarded in his hometown, a man with a homophobic streak.

Not much happens on top of the roof, but their brilliant talk in rapid-fire dialogue takes place in real time, driving the play ahead. The audience gets to know the two young men and their different characteristics.

The subtext of the text, Kjellgren says, shows that both characters have clear motives driving them through.

Horwood explains that Mikey is “out”, and has been on the receiving end of physical and verbal abuse and small-town gossip for years because of it. But in the character’s own words, he doesn’t “make a show of it” by being effeminate.

Casey, in contrast, is closeted, hiding it from his stepfather in particular, but Mikey is keen to show Casey off to his friends who are back in town from Dublin.

The main complication of the play, Kjellgren explains, is their inability to express love, because of the layers they’ve covered themselves with, so that the main question is: will they ever speak out their love for each other?

If We Got Some More Cocaine I Could Show You How I Love You, ACT Hub, Kingston, May 14-24.