When a book lives so vividly in one’s mind – as does Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing With Feathers – a stage adaptation can feel like a kind of hijacking. Here at Belvoir, however, at least it’s been wrested from your mind by a set of creative safe hands. It mightn’t be your Grief anymore, but it does feel like a work that will touch just about everyone who comes to see it.

Directed by Simon Phillips, this is the book entire, a prose-poetic portrait of a man (played by Toby Schmitz) attempting to raise two young sons in the wake of the sudden and entirely unexpected death of his wife. 

Things, as you might expect, get messy. He hits the bottle, does all the usual things one might do when your rock has been swept away. But he’s also a man of letters, which allows for the presence of a talking crow – the kind of corvid therapist an admirer of Ted Hughes might have nightmares about, a mythic figure with no regard for self-pity and the kind of British reserve that settles over tragedy like a suffocating blanket.