Thrillers and murder mysteries arrive on television all the time but are rarities on stage, so this gives one reason to welcome Stephen Sharkey’s strong drama, set in Liverpool during the Blitz of May 1941.

The period he chooses is one in which family quarrels are interrupted by the whine of the air-raid siren and fires turn the stage a flickering red at the edges; all of which gives another reason to welcome the play, since Britain’s wartime experience of attack from the air is also a rare subject these days.

The play opens in a bombed cemetery where the recently dead Frank Donohue’s grave has been blasted to bits, and his furious adolescent daughter Theresa, a May Queen in the last year of peace, rages against the Virgin Mary that overlooks the wreckage for her cold indifference. Gradually, we learn that Frank was killed in a fight with the man who was having an affair with his wife, and that the guilty couple had pretended he had died in an air raid. Theresa, swearing revenge, longs for her brother Michael (missing since Dunkirk) to come back and kill the killer. Unknown to her, Michael, almost insane with rage, and now a deserter, is on the outskirts of Liverpool with this aim in mind.

There are powerful echoes here of Greek tragedy, particularly The Oresteia, with son and daughter uniting against the man who slew their father. Even Michael’s eventual weakness and Theresa’s implacable hatred connect with their ancient precursors.

The gathering tension of Serdar Bilis’s fluent production takes us from the docks and outlying woods to the Donohue house at night, where the slaughtering is to be done, but Colin Richmond’s austere setting remains unchanged, a bare black slope curving down to the stage and seemingly made of crushed anthracite. Its stark beauty suggests a city in meltdown, the visual equivalent to the deaths we hear about throughout the play: bombed, drowned at sea, massacred in France.

Leanne Best’s Theresa is a scary portrait of a girl who cannot ever have been easy to like, now turned by grief into an avenging Fury, yet still able to respond to the tenderness offered by Michael’s fellow deserter (a good performance from Michael Ryan). Mark Arends, a lean and hungry Michael, has to undergo a change of heart that Sharkey doesn’t explain fully, though we can assume his encounter with Alisa Arnah’s Liliane, a sadly wise German Jew, is responsible.

Theirs is a moving scene but Sharkey writes several others, few more surprising than when Cathy Tyson, as Frank’s widow, Angela, erupts from her previous pious hypocrisy to become a crazed bruiser. Later, equally surprisingly, she sings Love’s Old Sweet Song with an awkward tenderness that touches the heart.

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