I feel a bit stupid grinning like this, but it’s like I’m sitting on a cushiony wedge of sun in the audience of So Blue, So Calm. It’s dark and cold outside, and I can hear a lonely weeknight tram rattling past, but I’m not there – I’m in Mutation Theatre’s backyard. I’m sprawled out on a lawn, in on a secret conversation between two guys I’ve never met before but I feel like I’ve always known.

This is the perfect backyard afternoon; blue sky, fresh grass and warm sun. A tall sunflower reaches for the sky. There’s a play pool and a whack-a-bat tennis game. A great place for two regular dudes to rattle out their thoughts and fears – the thoughts and fears of writer-director Patrick McCarthy.

What is it that people actually talk about? When theatrics are stripped back, and drama is pared down, what are we actually saying to each other most of the time?

It’s harder than it looks to perform something so natural and instinctive. The rhythm isn’t fanciful or complex, it just is. Staging impromptu conversational interjections, mixing in sweet, philosophical musings amongst crude, funny jokes must be harder than it looks.

At some points, I sit a little bit confused. How close are these two characters? How well do they know each other? How long for? If they are friends, they certainly sometimes talk like strangers. Is this an interrogation or friendly backyard banter?

But eventually you are washed in the warm glow of the performance. What does it matter? Here are two characters breathing the thoughts of the essential twentysomething male, not in hyperboles or terror, but off the cuff and funny.

In this one-hour slice of a lazy, utopian afternoon, we get an equally funny and heartbreakingly wistful conversation – and we feel lucky that we’re in on it.

It’s love and relationships, Japanese curry and pretty girls in the Centrelink queue, grandfathers and dream careers, high school and marriage and the nature of travel, the nature of life and what it is to be man, and what it is to be human.

Transcendental.