The Madwomen in the Attic was charting tense territory, depicting the aspects of mental health which can't be made beautiful or made to fit the defining characteristics of ‘the female.’ Walking into the ADC, made surprisingly cosy by the openness of the four chairs on stage facing the audience, you are made to feel like the sixth member of this five-woman cast.

The play's tense territory revolved around the interactions of survivors of domestic abuse in a weekly group counselling session. We first meet Antonia, ‘Toni’, who, after being locked in an attic by her abuser, had set fire to his house and had now been sectioned. The tableau of survivors of physical and mental abuse pans out to include Helen, the new girl to group therapy who ran away with her child from her husband, and Isabel, a nineteen-year-old checkout assistant at Tesco, pregnant from the boyfriend who took her away from school, beat her, and left her. They are brought together in Jane’s group therapy class, played wonderfully by Claire Burchett.

The play – a piece of student writing by Aoife Kennan – felt exactly the right size. I was taken surprise by how witty the writing was, and left with an ache in my chest from the touching performances of each of the survivors – the conversation between Isabel and Helen about children was flawless. The musical interludes by Olivia Gaunt's Gracie, Toni’s psychiatric nurse, rank Madwomen up there with the finest comedy I’ve seen in Cambridge. When a play about domestic abuse can have characters spontaneously breaking into song without feeling trite, you know it is a masterful example of theatre.

The unapologetically female pain and anger in the play was handled with an admirable sensitivity. From Isabel confiding that "it didn’t feel real" when her boyfriend started to hit her, to Gracie announcing that "Britney is shit," no line in the play felt false or contrived. It is even a joyous moment when Toni writes "wanking" on a whiteboard titled "how to deal with bad days."

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