From America to Africa, from rich to poor, the continuum of AIDS runs through this piece devised by Danai Gurira and Nikkole Salter about the wildly diverging and yet horribly similar stories of two black women living in Harare, Zimbabwe and South Central LA, United States.

Following each of them over the two days that they both find out they are HIV positive, Gurira and Salter create their stories simultaneously as they portray the different people they meet over that time. Tuned to near perfection by Robert O’Hara’s direction, they jump cut between the two, allowing ideas and concepts seen in the one to impinge on their audience’s perceptions of the other, while keeping both quite distinct and separate.

The brilliance of this is not merely in finding a piece of serious and very political theatre which is exciting, funny and entertaining to watch, or indeed in the utter assuredness which Gurira and Salter bring to their creation of a whole range of people, it is in the power that they give to their original two characters.

Danai Gurira’s Abigail Murambe is a self-assured news reader on ZBC in Harare. Gurira gives her just the right edge of haughtiness for her profession, while building it upon the realities of someone working in the precarious state sector in a city where power cuts are rife, who knows all too well that the glamour is only pixel deep.

In contrast, Nikkole Salter’s teenage Nia has little understanding of the responsibilities of her life. While she has the gift of being able to write poetry, she has no time for school, holding down a job, keeping her room in the shelter, or any life skill beyond being nice to her boyfriend. Yet Salter finds the charismatic edge in this chaos, creating a person you want to cherish, not treat with disdain.

The strength of their characterisation is enough to inform exactly how these two will be reacting when Gurira and Salter move round to creating the surrounding characters. While the power of the piece is the way it allows irony and humour to run right through its thought-provoking tragedy.