Dream of Perfect Sleep (Finborough Theatre)

The story of an ageing couple coping with dementia and terminal illness doesn’t sound like a barrel of laughs. And when the wife, Mary, starts declaiming that she is a goddess compelled to visit the Underworld you realise that this is a kind of dementia that perhaps only former classical scholars will suffer from.

The strangeness is compounded by the idea of celebrating Christmas in June, to please Mary, who won’t know what day or month it is. This is the scheme hatched by her husband, Gene, who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and who wants to summon their two children – a reformed drug addict and divorced father and a "new age" adopted daughter – for one last family gathering.

A bombshell is dropped and the aftershocks ripple outwards for the remainder of the play. That the bombshell is, in actual fact, none too surprising does not lessen the tension. We have been here before. This is not exactly new dramatic territory. But there is a feeling of raw truth about this play that is constantly absorbing.

The cast of four are directed with a very sure touch by Max Pappenheim, who captures every unflinching moment of anger, pain, regret, love and a score of other emotions, all incisively revealed in a traverse staging.

The resolution, however, seems a little too forced, as if the playwright, Kevin Kautzman, is pushing too hard to effect a reversal. The fact that the son and daughter are suddenly able to persuade themselves that they "see all the faces of the dead" – in their mother’s phrase – is too neat a conclusion. Do these classical flourishes really assist the basic premise of the play? What if Mary had not been a classical scholar, and did not want to have her ashes put into a Greek vase with images of Hercules decorating it? Would the drama of an ageing couple wanting to die be any the less? It may underline the sadness of a good mind disintegrating, but one can’t escape the feeling that it also adds a layer of theatrical eccentricity for its own sake.

Susan Tracy (last seen at this address in the revival of Rattigan’s Variation on a Theme) makes Mary’s transitions between lucidity and delusion terrifyingly believable, and Martin Wimbush invests Gene with a rueful determination and a wealth of love for his afflicted wife. Cory English as the lost soul of a son and Lisa Caruccio Came as the empathetic daughter are equally persuasive.

Dream of Perfect Sleep promises gloom and doom, but delivers a vivid richness of emotion. Who needs the drama of the World Cup (playing downstairs) when you can have 90 minutes of this instead?