BAFTA Rising Star winner David Jonsson’s script for Paldem grapples with some serious subjects without losing its dark humour, examining a  friendship threatened by the intrusion of a one-night stand. Covering fetishism, the challenges of early adulthood, and the bonding offered by a mutual love of Jeremy Paxman and Rick And Morty, Paldem follows two twentysomethings into complex intimacies.

‘Paldem is a derivative of a colloquial term used in London,’ explains Jonsson, who has risen to prominence through the varied likes of BBC’s Industry and Hollywood’s Alien: Romulus. ‘Mandem and girldem are culturally used to describe your closest friends. Affectionate in use, binary by structure. Paldem is somewhere in between. Extremely close pals... but just pals. Through the relationship of Megan (a white girl in her late 20s) and Kevin (a black boy in his late 20s), the play explores if that’s possible to be just pals.’

While the question may be familiar, this kind of friendship is rarely explored on stage. For Jonsson, the concept broadens into meditations on maturity. ‘When you meet Megan and Kevin, they’re in flux. They’re at that time in your twenties where you move from adolescence to a more certain adulthood. It can be an awkward, even scary transition. I think we all go through it. But what we rarely talk about is what it’s like when you take race and social construct into account. These are things we may try to avoid but what happens when we confront them? Maybe it makes the transition that bit more difficult.’

Contemporary life is lived both on and offline: one battle that the pair face is the cultural influence of the internet and the specifics of sexual desire in a digital age. Desire is no longer as personal as it once was. ‘As a society we love to label things. What’s “sexy” to one person, is a “turn-off” to another. What’s a “fetish” to one person is “vanilla” to the next, and so on,’ Jonsson says. ‘That might be fine if it were only objects that we were talking about. But today, and especially on the internet, it’s usually people. That’s what this play is exploring: the people behind the screen, who they actually are. The things they actually love. Or at least, think they do.’

The mixture of humour and darkness is something that Jonsson sees as intrinsic to life and theatre. ‘I love comedy and the complex things in life that make it dark. In my experience, it’s always the truth that darkens the waters, and the same is true of this play. But hopefully, underneath all that, is something that is deeply and maddeningly true. What you choose to do with that truth is totally up to you.’

Paldem, Summerhall, Thursday 31 July–Monday 25 August, 9pm; main picture: David Reiss.