STIFF! is a bleak show. Sure, bleak is ‘in’ with the comedy world at the moment. Lots of plays get billed as ‘dark comedy’, with their humour described as ‘black’ or ‘blue’ or some other colour that doesn’t immediately connote sunshine and lollipops. You might be thinking that bleakness was inevitable, what with it being about grave robbers and corpses, and yet surely the exclamation mark in the title suggests that it’s mostly light-hearted? Well, no. STIFF! is bleak – there is no getting around that.

It is also, in parts, brilliantly funny. It’s said that the key to farce is lots of doors, and two graves in the opening scene fulfil this function pretty well. In Mr Gregory (Hugh Stubbins)’s brief stage time, writer Sam Grabiner juggles morbidity and slapstick with all the panache you’d expect from someone who once studied at clown school (no, really). The two most gruelling moments of the play are starkly different in tone, from the stunned silence in the scene involving Molly (Olivia Le Andersen) and the orange juice, where the audience can do nothing but squirm, to Charlie (Archie Henderson) inadvertently blowing his cover through sheer giddiness, where it’s impossible not to laugh, however reluctantly.

Without a doubt the young character of Charlie is the masterpiece at the heart of this play. Grabiner has trodden the line exquisitely between making Charlie’s simplistic understanding of the world endearing without him ever becoming the butt of the joke, and Archie Henderson’s portrayal brilliantly nuances the transitions from terrified silence to gabbling schoolboy. It’s somehow fitting that, as the play ends, we never learn quite how he comes to terms with all the bitingly vicious people around him.

What STIFF! possesses in detail and atmosphere (the shipping forecasts are an especially nice touch), it sometimes feels limited purely by virtue of being an ADC lateshow. Molly and Charlie’s relationship is thoroughly mined for comic potential, but given the venom and power behind Molly’s confrontation, it could simply have done with more time to explore this change in dynamic. It borders on the spiritual, but just seems as if it turns back too soon. In addition, the cynicism and swearing brought by Frank (Adrian Gray), while of a quality to rival Malcolm Tucker, might have been more apt coming from a significantly older actor.

Once or twice I got the impression that this version of STIFF! had been cut down from a much larger work. So gripping were its best moments, and so dexterous were the leaps between comedy and tragedy, I don’t doubt that, in its most expanded form, it’s truly brilliant. Unfortunately, there’s still something missing.