Playwright Ben Hutchison establishes himself as an original and very distinctive voice with a play that has the gritty realism of a kitchen sink drama merging seamlessly into the weirdness of dream.
The verisimilitude of Kenah Trusewich's set design, with its sharp delineation of interior and exterior space, convincingly introduces the self-contained world of a lonely pensioner and his young flat mate.
But nothing seems to be quite right and the ordinary takes on a hallucinatory quality as the burial of a beloved dog is endlessly deferred and romance between a pair of deeply antagonistic lovers blossoms in a shadow cast by a slowly decomposing corpse.
The absurdist dialogue brings to mind both Pinter and Beckett, while the humour has a macabre edge that will not be to everyone's taste.
But the writing is so startlingly idiosyncratic that the audience is enticed into an intriguingly odd world where a trio of variously damaged characters find a way out of their loneliness through the painful process of acknowledging who they really are.
