Tovey is, simply put, magnificent. This may not be a career-best performance so much as a career-defining one: stripped of anywhere to hide, he gives us a fully inhabited human being in real time; deadpan and dryly funny with the timewasting callers one moment, physically unravelling with grief and anger the next. What lingers longest is the smallness of it: a directorial instinct that favours the flicker of an expression over any grander gesture, so the audience is trained to watch for the tiniest crack in Joe’s composure and rewarded, again and again, for doing so.

Alex Eales’s set does exactly what it needs to and nothing more: a desk, a locker, two abandoned workstations gathering dust behind him. Anna Watson’s lighting does more than the set lets on: a neon ring circles the space like a slow noose, tightening by degrees so gradually you clock the change only in hindsight. Gareth Fry’s sound design is sparer still, but every crackle and drop-out down the phone line lands with more weight than most of the dialogue. Between them, the three keep the audience as blind as Joe is: we hear what he hears and see no more than he sees, so the not-knowing sits with us exactly as it sits with him.