@ Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, until Sat 21 Mar 2015

It is a grim, gutsy tale from the Welsh valleys that opens the Traverse’s latest A Play, A Pie and A Pint series. None of your customary plucky mining community beating the odds here though. Matthew Trevannion’s Leviathan hews away at a less obvious thematic seam. Set in the garden of a council house, it’s an all female affair, following three generations of the same family whose middle member is lost in mental distress, to the discomfort and concern of the other two.

Claire Cage plays Karen, the tortured soul at the heart of the piece, insightfully and with tenderness. She’s been slumped in an armchair in the garden – making them a burning tyre away from being ‘gyppos’, according to daughter Hannah – for days. Occasionally, she wakes from pained, silent slumber for frantic bursts of lucidity that offer the audience the slow reveal.

All the while, Hannah (Gwawr Loader) and grandmother Mavis (Siw Hughes) fret; the former wants her mother to be hospitalised, the latter will have none of it. Yet neither are free from personal troubles themselves. Hannah has a sugar-daddy, a string of random lovers and a tendency to cry wolf, Mavis a battle with the bottle and a sadness in her marriage. The on-stage relationship between the pair works very well. Loader and Hughes pitch their strops and bickering at just the right level and the dialogue is peppered with the kind of barbed jocularity only families can manage. The silent Karen becomes a puppet in their own private battles as well as a focal point for their concern.

Sherman Cymru‘s Artistic Director Rachel O’Riordan has drawn out a distinctive Welshness in both characters and script, giving the play flavour and depth. It is of its place, without feeling defined by it. The set is uncomplicated and unobtrusive, allowing the family room to perform, and a black-humoured wit provides laughter, which in this warm, sad play is needed more by the characters than it is the audience.