‘Tis Pity is an odd play. Should you find yourself in the position of having to describe the plot to anyone, do not make the same mistake I did, which is to shrug and say “Well, it’s sort of about incest… and stuff”.

Knowing as little about the plot as this, I wasn’t sure what to expect upon entering The Arts. The curtain was up and the stage occupied by a skinny teenage girl with translucent skin and a shaved side to her head. What with the True Blood and Vampire Diaries posters adorning the blood-red walls of her bedroom, the sole setting of the play, I felt that my neighbour was perfectly justified in muttering, ‘Oh, how edgy,’ as the lights dimmed.

From that point on, however, we were rapt. The cast so perfectly portrayed the odd blend of intensity and obscurity in their character’s actions that the play’s sharpness was almost palpable. Like a cross between Baz Luhrmann’s Catholic-imagery-filled Romeo + Juliet and Skins, ‘Tis Pity continued, through the shock of Giovanni and Annabella’s incestuous, eye-wateringly sexual relationship, past her pregnancy and honour-saving wedding to Soranzo and onto the climax. The action then escalated from Annabella’s tutor having her tongue bitten out, mid-coitus, by a male stripper to Giovanni, in apparent rage at Annabella’s now-happy marriage, killing his sister and cutting out her heart. Cheery stuff.

However, ‘Tis Pity did not descend into glee at its own gore. Nor did it wallow in the fact that it was making A Point about the link between sex and death in teen culture (see: True Blood, Twilight etc.). Annabella summed this up perfectly when she returned to the stage post-mortem and reached timidly out for her own removed heart, clutched gruesomely by her brother. This was a show pulsating with life even when it confronted its audience with the jarring nature of death. And it was superb.