BARNEY Norris talks a really good show, but he hasn’t quite written one yet with Fear Of Music.

It still feels like a work in progress, with plenty of ideas but holes too, and the original title (Missing) is not the only thing missing from this domestic drama, re-written since its London debut last year.

Oxbridge graduate Norris has an impressive contacts book: Out Of Joint and its artistic director Max Stafford Clark are backing this tour and esteemed playwrights David Hare and Caryl Churchill have both provided advice. He could not have better mentors as a work in progress himself.

Fear Of Music shares its name with Talking Heads’ third album, denoting Norris’s own interest in pop and rock music, an interest forged in his Sunday evening habit of taping the Top 40 in his room, weekend after weekend.

He was advised the lonely habit was too obsessive to be the central subject of a play, but nevertheless, the elder of his story’s two brothers from Andover, university student Luke (Hasan Dixon), goes about his Sunday fix of trying to guess when Radio jock Bruno Brookes will stop talking at a song’s intro as he waits with finger paused over his cassette recorder. Fear of talk, not music, you could say.

That brings a smile of Eighties’ recognition and feels the most truthful observation in this 75-minute study of brothers stuck in a room in 1988 to 1993.

As represented in Carys Rose Beard’s set design of a wall of tapes, that sense of freezing a moment and then being trapped in that time runs through the play. Luke may be the first in the family to go to university but he can never quite leave younger brother Andy (Jack Finch in his professional debut in his final year at Central). Andy is sort of in band, but can’t yet play guitar or write songs…but he could if only…well, that is his fear of music as much as it is his fear of life.

Hot-headed, capricious, needy, Andy is contemplating following his father into the Army, an obvious path in the Hampshire squaddie town Andover, but Luke is desperate to stop him.

Brought to life by vigorous, raw and touching performances by Dixon and Finch in Alice Hamilton’s unsettling production, Norris’s writing has shards of wit, a sense of forlorn claustrophobia and inertia and a feel for brotherly love , however.

In keeping with Greek tragedies – making it a failing shared with the ancient pinnacle of drama – he is prone to reportage in the big moments, moments that always lead back to the bedroom. We need to learn more about the oft-mentioned, never seen Mother, and the ending feels rushed, robbing it of teenage tragedy.