As you would expect from the author of The Ruling Class and Red Noses, the play revels in gallows humour.
Characters die laughing.
Barnes the writer is equally at home with the poetic and the music hall. In a blanket of snow that obliterates all evidence of the dead, a play that is littered with corpses and dark despair is suddenly full of blinding white light. The journey ends not in the triumph of death but in the triumph of love. Comedy used as a weapon against the pain of the living is transformed into a passionate and compassionate laughter at the absurd resilience of the human spirit. Great performances, too, and none better than Gerard Murphy's Mallory, a great mule of a man who finds life in death, a home among the wreckage and wisdom through his own foolishness.