Attempt a quick Google search of David Ives’s 2010 play Venus In Fur, and you’ll find words like “raunchy sex comedy” flung around like so much discarded lingerie. Though they’re not entirely inaccurate, the words leave the wrong impression, calling to mind more the slapstick bedroom farces of the 1960s than the evocative, sexually-charged play that closes today at Masquerade’s Blue Box theatre.

That’s not to say that Venus in Fur is lacking either comedy or sexiness – actually, it’s got both in spades. The script contains exactly the kind of sharp, smart exchanges that I’m always excited to see brought to life on the Maltese stage. Of course, having a clever script will only get you so far in the theatre and, with a two-hander such as this, it’s more important than ever that casting be just right.

Here’s where director Michael Mangion’s excellent casting choices come into play. As alumni of the popular Christmas feature Comedy Knights, both Jo Caruana and Thomas Camilleri are certainly no strangers to comedy, but this is a different animal altogether. Luckily, it’s one that they’ve successfully tamed. As the only characters to be seen onstage during the play, the action is firmly in their hands, and it’s clear that Mangion has entrusted this task to the right people.

When she first appears on stage as struggling actress Vanda Jordan, Jo Caruana portrays the kind of woman who may sneeringly have been referred to as ‘common’ a couple of generations ago.

She’s unrefined, ditzy, and ready to strip down to her underwear at the drop of a hat to pushily campaign for the role she’s after. As the play-within-a-play begins, the switch is flipped, and, with effortless ease, she is transformed into Wanda von Dunayev – the elegant representation of a bye-gone age of femininity.

The sudden change in demeanour catches both the audience, and Thomas Camilleri’s frustrated writer/director Thomas Novachek off guard. From that first transformation, the balance of power begins to shift. Though Camilleri starts in a traditional position of power – as a man, a director, an intellectual – his control of the situation is gradually taken away from him and he unravels beautifully. Whereas the change portrayed by Caruana is sudden, as she snaps back and forth from the real to the fictional in an instant, it is subtler in Camilleri. It becomes impossible to tell where the writer ends and his characters begin, and Camilleri walks this difficult line with apparent ease.

In the simplest terms, the transitions between characters are first shown on stage through the use in a shift of dialects. Though the American accents had a couple of hit-and-miss moments in the beginning of the play, it was a very effective device. As she shifted between Vanda and Wanda, Jo Caruana’s physical performance was so striking that is was possible to tell which character she was playing before she had even opened her mouth to speak.

In setting the stage for Venus In Fur, director Michael Mangion has the good sense not to gild the lily. The technical aspects of the play- lights, sounds, set, and so on- are all up to scratch, but they’re as simple as they ought to be in order to allow the focus to fall where it should: on the complex relationship unfolding in front of us.

Looking at the structure of Venus In Fur, it would seem on the outside to be a simple play. The action is continuous and takes place in the same space, so there are no scene changes or breaks to move the pace along.

While this sounds simple in theory, it is actually part of what makes the play tricky – and it’s an aspect that slows this production down somewhat.

While the performances are powerful throughout, a 90-minute conversation can be somewhat exhausting to the audience without the lulls and beats which are usually provided by scene changes.

However, though the pace could have been shaken up in places, the show is carried forward by its excellent source material and cast.

Though a play like this will always inevitably be advertised on the power of its sexiness and raunchy subject matter, I feel that would only sell Venus In Fur short.

Intelligent, provocative and refreshingly sharp, Venus In Fur is a definite highlight of the theatrical season so far.