Living and the Dead, The

Aroview: Intense, left-field chamber piece takes the over-familiar scenario of a dysfunctional aristocratic family out of the ordinary, centering its horror on a cancer-stricken mother and her unstable, mentally-challenged son.

An unusual work that succumbs to grotesquerie against its better instincts and is too shrill and ill-defined in its portrait of mental illness, but the location is magnificent - an abandoned country manor of some 250 rooms.