A bank transfer. On the face of it, a mundane administrative task; but look deeper, and every payment tells a story. Transfers follows the path of £500 as it’s passed from person to person – sometimes electronically, sometimes in a literal brown envelope – across a series of potent two-handed vignettes. As we watch, we slowly build a picture of why this money matters, and the relationships and tensions between the people who give and receive.

Keeping the £500 together – rather than letting it be spent a fiver a time in Tesco’s – presents an interesting narrative challenge, and a surprising number of the characters end up deciding it’s money they’re better off without. But their reasons for rejecting the half-grand are credible, illuminating and varied; although the episodic structure means we don’t get to spend much time with any of them, we do learn a little about what makes each one tick, and witness the contradictions between different aspects of their lives.

The eight scenarios were originally devised by the cast, before being refined into a final script by Martin Foreman. The result is a rich and pleasantly surprising mix of topics – one moment it’s homelessness, the next it’s OnlyFans – with Foreman’s guiding pen ensuring the work still coalesces into a coherent whole. Some of the social messaging is a little heavy-handed, and the arguments made might be that touch more powerful if they trusted us to develop them ourselves; but the themes are clearly important to the cast, lending the performance a palpable integrity. Sound and lighting are on point too, persuasively evoking the sensory overload of a busy nightclub or the urgency of an approaching ambulance.

Boldly but cleverly, the scenes are presented out of order, leaving us in the audience to piece the sequence of transfers together into a chain. It lends an intriguing, riddling context to the dialogue, as we wonder how and whether the transfer we’re watching will connect to one we’ve already seen – and it also means important topics (such as the burden of supporting a loved one with dementia) can be approached twice, with time for reflection in between.

Transfers is a successful experiment in collaborative creation, and a neat realisation of a clever concept. There’s some unexpected humour, a comic misunderstanding or two, but there’s true gravity and poignancy as well. Above all, it explores everything that a payment can imply: guilt, opportunity, salvation, ruin. Buy a ticket – it’s money well spent.