A glance at playwright Jo Clifford’s note in this show’s programme will confirm that this is a dearly personal piece of work for her. It will also illustrate that the spirituality that’s such a fundamental part of it is not some self-consciously poetical metaphor; she really believes in such things, and with good reason, as the programme also indicates. Clifford is surely the most dogged-by-death British playwright since JM Barrie, her mother having died suddenly when she was twelve, her wife dying of a stroke in 2004 and Jo herself having faced life-threatening surgery. This is her reflection on her wife’s death.

An intelligent and moving examination of a subject that has far too long been sidelined in our society

Reminiscent of Pirandello’s masterpiece Six Characters in Search of an Author, five, well, characters emerge onto Francis O’Connor’s abstract set, walled by panes of reflective tinted glass (the ‘through a glass darkly’ reference is not accidental). Speaking directly to the audience, they’re soon revealed to be your average idiosyncratic family; Mary (Kathryn Howden), the mother, is a tax inspector, her husband Joe (Jonathan Hackett) is a teacher prone to spouting Marcusian criticisms of Western society, their son Kev (Kyle McPhail) just wants to live inside his video game, daughter Mazz (Jenny Hulse) is a wannabe fashion designer, and grandma (Tina Grey) is in a wheelchair. When Mary suddenly suffers a stroke, she’s met by death (Liam Brennan) and led through the afterlife.

Director Mark Thomson manages overall to nail a difficult balance between the darkest of themes and the life-affirming levity that Clifford injects it with. Breaking through the proscenium arch, the cast handle the challenge with ease, showing us how this stage works best. Some moments flirt with sentimentality, particularly a dance-in-the-face-of-death sequence in which dancers spin and weave around the stage to uplifting-by-numbers orchestra music, but somehow it never tips into the saccharine, managing instead to be genuinely moving; and gutsy. Such things are well grounded by the general humility of the dramatic technique, the sheer honesty in the writing and particularly Joe’s hugely satisfying rants about the insanity of nuclear weapons and the prolonged injustice of the West living off the backs of those in the developing world. Most of all, it’s an intelligent and moving examination of a subject that has far too long been sidelined in our society.

Showing @Lyceum 19 March – 10 April 19:45