‘This isn’t about you,’ civil celebrant Fern tells herself, mid-eulogy, towards the start of this one-woman play, written and performed by Amy Conway. Nor is it about the dead person either, she goes onto say. Instead, she draws our focus towards the people at the heart of funerals: the living left behind. One of these is the mother of a newly deceased man who did unthinkable deeds in early adulthood, which went unpunished throughout his life. Fern’s challenge is to prise the details from his mother, before probing her own soul to find a way to reconcile them with her role leading his funeral. 

Conway is an outstanding performer, and for the first two thirds of the play she guides us through her complex, knotty script, full of tangents and philosophical questions, with sharp clarity. But then comes a revelation, hinted at earlier, that swerves us into an almost entirely different play. It’s an admirable one (perhaps more admirable than the promises laid by the first part) but one which takes the moral threads of Conway’s carefully opened Pandora’s Box and divides them neatly into black and white. In the end this is Fern’s story, and it’s heartbreaking. And still, the mourners are left behind. 

Catafalque, Summerhall, run ended.