Entering the dark and intimate Corpus Playroom, I was confronted with a stark living space: there are no hangings on the walls or colour apart from the red of a worn-out leather sofa and the blue of beer cans crudely stuffed into drawers. But there is also a sense of mess and detritus in the jumble of monochrome clothes cluttering the scene. Bromely Bedlam Bethlehem proved to be a play as brilliantly stark and jumbled as the set. I found this incredible piece of new writing by Rachel Tookey emotionally powerful and structurally disconcerting. Last year it won the Marlowe Society’s prestigious Other Prize, and after having been heavily re-edited, the show appears for the first time fully staged by director Katie Woods.

Bromley Bedlam Bethlehem depicts three generations of an immigrant family living in South London and struggling under the strain of mental illness. Eamonn, the Irish grandfather, is an alcoholic with dementia living on benefits in Bromley while his grandson Ben has dropped out of university twice and is suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. Ben’s mother, Sara, is a divorcee and the busy CEO of a marketing company; she eventually finds herself dealing with the trauma of her father and her son’s respective suicides. Briefly outlining of the plot of Bromley Bedlam Bethlehem, however, does little justice to the ingenuity and strength of the writing: what appears at first to be an ordinary kitchen-sink drama eventually reveals itself as temporally interlaced and darkly hallucinatory. The play is full of sardonic moments of climax as well as heart-wrenching realisations of desolation and isolation.

I was particularly impressed by the realism of the acting. Saskia West played the tight-lipped Sara with fantastic subtlety, always treading the tight-rope between anger, power, and emotional fragility. Student actors playing older generations can often fall flat in Cambridge productions, but I found Connor Rowlett fantastically convincing with a thick Irish accent and stiff-jointed physicality playing Eamonn. Last, but certainly not least in talent, Ed Paget gave a nuanced and anxiety-ridden performance as the young Ben, unable even to put on a fresh pair of clothes or walk out of the front door. The small amount of doubling was executed very successfully. The directing was very good: the pacing of the show was exhilarating and I thought the onstage movement made for a fantastic use of the space in Corpus as well as establishing complex dynamics between characters.

The more technical features of the production were spare and greatly affecting. The lighting was often a simple white wash, bare and aggressive, as if to demonstrate the forms of scrutiny or pressure the characters were under from society at large as well as the pain in their own heads. The use of spotlight during Sara’s monologue was very effective in transporting us to another space. The play didn’t make use of music, but sound clips of phones ringing, trains running and wind blowing made for a charged and dismal tone in which past and present could painfully collide.

All in all, I was really impressed by the sheer amount of raw talent Bromley Bedlam Bethlehem has to offer, making it fully deserving of four and a half stars. Despite only being an hour long, this production manages to explore the unhinging of three minds in great depth. The sentimentality of melodrama is avoided in favour of a dark reliance on metaphor and ‘subtext’. Surprisingly, however, the play’s metatheatrics do not hinder the brilliance or believability of its characterisation. Make sure you do not miss this electric performance on at Corpus!

Bromley Bedlam Bethlehem is on at the Corpus Playroom at 9.30pm until 3 February