A group of young people coming together after 20 years for a reunion celebrating the height of their youth… their acknowledging of all their loss felt so urgent and reflective of us coming together in the theatre having survived our treacherous times. It captured me and made me reckon with my mortality and the immortality of the art that I try to make.

Afterwards, when I was still crying and praising everyone, they all looked at me saying: “Are you crazy? We weren’t doing anything special.” And I thought, that’s why they were so brilliant: they were just a vessel for what felt like a lot of healing and investigation into the wounds we still have open.

Analysis – David Benedict

In his previous play, Appropriate, US playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, whose credits also include An Octoroon, dealt with a family stalked by ghosts. But in The Comeuppance, – a rapid response to Covid set immediately after the pandemic, and a cunning cross between naturalism and the supernatural – the stalker is death.

As five former friends meet in autumn 2022 for their high-school reunion in a suburb outside Washington DC, death appears both metaphorically and literally on the stage. Its visitation is central to the now fractured group who, telling and uncovering both secrets and lies, find themselves in varying ways facing it sooner than they would have expected.

Eric Ting’s atmospheric 2024 Almeida production – he also directed the play’s premiere at New York’s Signature Theatre the previous year – featured Anthony Welsh, Tamara Lawrance, Yolanda Kettle, Ferdinand Kingsley and Katie Leung.