UNDER actor and director Andy Love’s astute artistic direction, York company Wildgoose Theatre have brought a series of strong plays and premieres to the city.

This continues with the choice of Laura Wade’s Colder Than Here, a play with death, or, rather, impending death at its core. Wade’s play is a timely wake-up call for how we deal with mortality, suggests Love.

He is not directing this York premiere. Instead Louise Larkinson does so, suggesting the play to Wildgoose, having seen the play only days after she herself had received a cancer diagnosis.

In Colder Than Here, wife and mother of two Myra (Beryl Nairn) has terminal bone cancer and is determined to die on her own terms, busily arranging burial plots and making funeral plans, with the controlling efficiency she has run their family life.

Husband Alec (John Lister) "can't really do problems"; he struggles to express love too. Elder daughter Harriet (Sophie Buckley) is practical, resourceful, sensible, resentful of difficult sister Jenna (Claire Morley), who is needy, has boyfriend problems, an eating disorder and a nicotine addiction. Oh, and she swears a chuff of a lot.

Wade aims is to present an unsentimental play of love, death and grief that balances raw emotion with a deliciously delicate black humour. In truth, it stiffs a little in this production, where the emotions are to the fore in Nairn and Morley's performances, but the black humour does not surface, when it is really needed in Lister's performance in particular. The understated Buckley, however, is spot on, full of pathos.

Colder Than Here, Wildgoose Theatre, Friargate Theatre, York, until Sunday. Box office: 01904 613000.