This is a comedy about death; about three people watching a friend dying of cancer and finally helping her to die. And it is a comedy. I wouldn’t have thought so daunting an enterprise possible to bring off but Bryony Lavery manages it brilliantly, never letting us forget that the untimely death of a person is a wretched thing, but at the same time, by some miracle of artistry, infusing the situation from start to finish with jokes, absurdities and bounding spirits.

All four characters in Last Easter are theatre folk: June, the one with cancer, is a lighting designer; Leah is a prop-maker, usually seen working on hand-puppet tree-frogs; Gash is a singer/drag artist; and Joy an actress in the frenzied Ab Fab mould. These last two could have taken the play into cliché territory but for the warmth and unfazed decency that Peter Polycarpou finds in the gabby Gash and the unswerving bravura of Christine Kavanagh’s Joy.

Leah, Gash and the fitfully sober Joy hatch a plot to take June on a holiday to southern France, where they will contrive to find themselves – surprise, surprise – near Lourdes and, as one of them puts it, “push her in the holy pool”. The four of them set off on a boozy ride in a rented car and in due course find themselves in a world of candles, statuettes and dashed hopes, where, in one of the play’s several bizarre yet touching scenes, Joy is prayed for in her friends’ three different religions.

Douglas Hodge gives a fizzing pace to this 75-minute work (seen in the Birmingham Rep’s studio theatre), with the actors moving among us, behind us, even climbing ladders to play the balcony piano; they talk to us, cut into one another’s talk and zip us through the stages of June’s steady decline.

Gash, inevitably, is a Garland fan, though it is the dreamily hopeful words of Easter Parade that are woven through the play. One of Caravaggio’s paintings also plays its part, because of June’s fascination with light. Janet Dibley plays her with a quiet rapture, splashed with bursts of anger, and her gradual withdrawal from the busy world is beautifully judged. Caroline Faber plays the Jewish Leah and, like the other three, ably treads the difficult line between laughing and weeping in the presence of death. In showing how this can be done Lavery has written an impressive, profoundly civilised work.

Box office: 0121-236 4455. Runs to November 10

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