Which of us hasn’t reinvented reality on the cinema screens we keep in our heads? Who hasn’t decided that it would be nice to watch an internal Notting Hill rather than another Psycho, Birds or Battleship Potemkin — or, to cite the symbolic title of Évelyne de la Chenelière’s play, enjoy strawberries rather than ageing potatoes in bleak old January?

At any rate, that’s clearly the view of the Quebecois playwright’s protagonist, François, an aspiring screenwriter and full-time café owner whose imagination is more fulfilling than the life he spends with his coffee-making machine in downtown Montreal. One moment his former flatmate and ex-mistress, Sophie, is unsuccessfully imploring him to wed her. The next she’s turning down his marriage proposal in the same words he’s just used. Guess which plea and rejection are real and which are illusory.

There’s not much doubt here, but elsewhere the games that de la Chenelière’s plays with reality can be confusing. Maybe they are meant to be so, emphasising that there’s a no-man’s-land between fantasy and fact; but I would still have liked more help both from the dramatist and from Roxana Silbert, who directs Rona Munro’s translation for Paines Plough. After all, the Traverse has lights that can dim, brighten, change colour and do all sorts of fancy, suggestive things.

De la Chenelière focuses most strongly on the ups and downs of Paul Thomas Hickey’s glum, insecure, deceitful and self-deceiving François and Gabriel Quigley’s more robust and honest Sophie, but it was her subplot or co-plot that I found diverting. François has a friend, Phil McKee’s Robert, who is an academic and a bachelor. Sophie has one too, Lesley Hart’s Lea, a single mother who gives up the country B&B she runs in protest against “too much fresh air and boredom” and relocates to Montreal. Guess what happens on the occasions she and Robert meet.

You’re right. The answer is or seems to be romance, but each time it takes a genuinely funny form. Robert complains that he’s found a mouse in his bed and is told, Fawlty Towers style, to be grateful that the cat has brought him a gift. Then he and Lea clash at François’s supper table in what turns out to be the Beatrice and Benedick manner. And so to an ending which, whether factual or imaginative, brims with feel-good factor.

Here’s my own problem. De la Chenelière is a witty, observant, refreshingly good-natured writer, yet she still left this old curmudgeon nostalgic for the work of her compatriots, Brad Fraser and Judith Thompson. Oh, for some of the toughness they brought to the recording of Canadian life.

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