You Can Always Hand Them Back (Colchester)

We meet the principal characters as they are on the brink of becoming grandparents for the first time. Their two children – Annabel (who prefers to be called Anna) and Marcus (who answers to Mark) – are married respectively to James and Julia. We soon grasp that Julia is not the daughter-in-law that every mother dreams of having.

But that's as nasty as it gets. Hall's book centres on the way an established couple come to terms, not just with the younger, travel-fixated, technologically-aware generations, but with their own ageing. First the need for a stairlift, then hearing loss, and finally death itself take their inexorable toll. That sounds gloomy, but this show isn't like that at all.

Skellern writes tunes, quite catchy if not particularly memorable ones, and his lyrics are spot-on. This is something of a singspiel, a play illuminated by music, as Kate Dyson and Paul Greenwood – who play Kath and Maurice – demonstrate. Director Andrew Breaknell and designer Jane Linz-Roberts keep the stage uncluttered – a back wall onto which photographs are projected, a sofa, a glimpse of a kitchen-diner and the staircase.

Musical director Stefan Bednarczyk presides at the piano, which is part of the living-room, supporting yet more family photographs. Greenwood makes Maurice thoroughly understandable as well as likeable while Dyson's Kath comes over as someone to be enjoyed slightly less. There's some fleet-footed choreography by Charlie Morgan, as the couple remember their own courtship and early married days.

Although we never actually see Olly, Sophie or Leonard in the flesh, their own passage from squirming baby days (any babysitter's nightmare) through childhood onto the brink of maturity is charted through their grandparents' experience of them and their final leave-taking of Maurice is lump-at-the-back-of-the-throat stuff.

You Can Always Hand Them Back runs at the Mercury Theatre, Colchester until 28 June.