A myriad of proposals, a huge explosion and an overprotective tortoise: Siân Docksey’s play is so much more than the story of her grandmother, who was trapped under the telephone switchboard when a bomb destroyed the King David Hotel where she worked in Jerusalem in 1946. The writing and the production were slick, poignant and witty. Quake opens with all five characters gazing into the distance speaking in turn to set the scene. For some reason a mysterious musician in the background provides drums at the beginning and between scene changes, and although he looked somewhat uninterested in the play, this fortunately did not reflect my own feelings.

The dramatic and gloomily lit opening scene moves smoothly into a family home in the Armenian quarter of Jerusalem. Two of the sisters, Anoush (Lydia Morris-Jones) and Myriam (Holly Marsden), argue over clothes. For me this is where the tone was really set for the whole play – the girls manage to talk about their worries for their safety and their future but always in a light-hearted and often amusing way. Family tensions concerning moving away to America, prejudice against the British military command and indeed about who the girls might marry never spill over into uncomfortable argument, and the characters never take themselves too seriously.

There are only subtle hints that the play is moving towards a disaster for Anoush. Our attention is focussed instead on the plight of Anoush's admirer, an English gentleman, Ernest (played effortlessly by Hugh Wyld), who is baffled about how to behave when offered a cup of tea by a surly Armenag (Sam Curry), thanks to insights into Armenian etiquette offered by the sisters. He deals with this, and also being attacked by a tortoise, very well. (The tortoise itself is not, as I first assumed, a Stoppardian touch on the writer’s part but apparently a real family pet alive and well in Jerusalem to this day.)

When Anoush runs back into work to retrieve her handbag before a cigarette break it is apparent that something more is going on. While she talks through the minutiae of her daily life in the office, the whole cast are on stage adding their voices, building up to the moment of the explosion. The contrast between the usual activities of the office and the sudden outburst of the explosion had me jumping out of my skin. I had wondered how, with some white boxes and a cabinet, they were possibly going to suggest the aftermath of a bomb in the Corpus Playroom. But with some well-choreographed physical theatre, it worked.

Even then, I wondered how, if much of the rest of the play would be one girl’s monologue whilst stuck under some rubble, we would be kept entertained. Again, I was not disappointed. Anoush prays desperately and imagines various scenes of speaking to her colleagues and Christmas with the family. She becomes obsessed with forcing herself to wake up. We realise the clever ambiguity of whether this takes place while she was trapped, later when she was in a coma, or when we see her now, a grandma, forcing herself to wake up from a nap to find she is safe in her own son’s home in England with a teenage granddaughter who has absolutely no desire to play scrabble with her. Her son and his wife nervously discuss whether to tell Anoush the news of her sister Miryam’s death in Armenia but after all “She’s hardy, they dropped a hotel on her remember?”

Anoush’s death is happily not the last thing we see. Miryam’s doctors become Anoush’s after her rescue as the cast dramatically pound their chests in the rhythm of a heartbeat. Instead of the end of a long life, we end with her reading the letters from Ernest who, after two years of asking every day, has made his last proposal. (His approach was always hopelessly casual: “Will you marry me” “No” “Shame”.)

Morris-Jones, quite rightly, comes close to stealing the show, but for me it was the way the actors worked together so well that gave the play its charm. Powell is responsible for a lot of the play’s ability to move so smoothly from one time to another. She manages to be completely different in voice and mannerisms in every one of her characters with no help from a costume change and very little time between scenes.

The movement back and forth between past, present and future works fantastically. The scenes with all five actors miming various activities didn’t always run smoothly, with Curry stumbling over his lines a bit whilst remembering his precise action for moving the wires of the operating board. But I put this down to first night nerves which will no doubt be banished by the knowledge that the play was received so well by its audience. Docksey’s first play is brilliantly written and well directed - the writing is amusing but the cast made it even more so.