It is safe to say that Bird Pie is like nothing you have seen before – a Whodunnit told through the voices of those who have been ‘done’. The massacre of the entire Crow family on a remote country farm looks to be the work of the psychopathic daughter, Rachel. However, she comes back from the dead, along with the other bodies, to prove her innocence and oust the true guilty party. And there’s music, too.

The musical element of the play does not dominate it, with only a handful of numbers.  Nonetheless, the familiar melodies successfully add to the surreal mood. Nothing in the play conforms to theatrical norms, and the instrumentation was no exception to this. A clarinet accompanies a keyboard and works delightfully well in the close setting of the playrooms.The two constables, played by Elizabeth Schenk and Iwan Davies, perform them faultlessly. The intimacy of the playrooms also allows the singers to shine without the intermediary of microphones, which was exploited outstandingly by Catherine Shaw as Dr Dubion.

The play's inventiveness does not end with the music; gameshow elements maintain the surreal mood, and are an ingenious way of revealing the characters’ truths and lies.  However, similar innovation would be welcome elsewhere, as much of the play is dominated by long monologues. These could have the same dramatic effect in half the time, so feel a little like they are being used to pad out the play when the writer ran out of clever ideas.

The monologues are very well acted.  Georgina Terry as the corpse of Rachel Crow does very well to draw the audience into such an odd play from the opening, while Rochelle Thomas, playing Margie Hooper, is convincingly shaken as the true murder comes to light. Charlie Merriman’s believably psychotic Jacob grows into the play’s leading figure and carries the plot to its grim conclusion.

Such a high standard is to be expected when the actors’ credits in the programme make such impressive reading. Most notably experienced are the children, sourced from the Young Actors’ Company based in Cambridge, who are all exceptionally talented, and I am sure that the second cast (performing alternate nights on Wednesday and Friday) is equally excellent.

The corpses are marked out by their sickeningly gory make-up, which looks incredibly realistic even as close as the second row; so grossly realistic, in fact, that I felt a little put-off, and I was relieved when the corpses made way for the ‘live’ characters later in the play.  The make-up is so disgusting that there was no way Ben Lynn, playing the young Jacob, was going to hold Freddie Crossley’s ‘burnt’ hand during the curtain call, and for that I do not blame him.

The production team has not been particularly proactive with publicity, as it must be the only play in Cambridge for which I have not been fliered this term, and the show will need more publicity urgently to lure punters away from the other musical attraction on this week. Bird Pie is the weirdest play I have seen in Cambridge by quite some margin. It offers something completely different, a bold and innovative show that works – somehow.