IN INDEPENDENT theatre company MKA’s latest pop-up theatre venue – prefab cubicle offices in a warehouse – it is Tuesday and ”Specials Day” at the local supermarket. Store manager (James Deeth) is redesigning the employee of the month certificate and providing exemplary customer service to the likes of a sad, perfectionist housewife (Jenny Seedsman), bouncy, idiosyncratic schoolgirl (Brigid Gallacher) and edgy, aggro young man (Zak Zavod).

Rows of blackened milk containers line the floors and are suspended from the ceiling, fluorescent lights flicker on and off and Tuesday’sfour protagonists all look as if they are on their way to a nervous breakdown.

Emerging playwright Louris van de Geer demonstrates a keen eye for the ordinary stuff that gets under our skin: from the insane competition for a car park to the unavailability of a particular brand of peaches. The supermarket’s familiar unnerving soundscape of screaming children, cashier beeps, Muzak and insistent price-checks is backdrop to Van de Geer’s natural and engaging writing style that illuminates, by way of first-person monologues, her characters’ interior worlds set against against an increasingly sinister external one.

Tuesday does occasionally strain at metaphor and its momentum falters around the halfway mark.

Seedsman is particularly affecting as a woman who can no longer communicate with her adolescent son.

MKA is well worth the trip into Melbourne’s inner-city industrial wasteland.