Within 60 seconds of this A Play, A Pie, and A Pint/Traverse co-produced comedy from Douglas Maxwell, the audience are in stitches.

This is after Jim (Scott Fletcher) makes a foul-mouthed faux pas in front of his newly-deceased boss's widow, Annabelle, played by Joanna Tope .

The laughter is a trend that continues throughout the rest of the production which looks at grief, and our use of so-called "bad" language. And at the end of the day you can't ask much more from a comedy than that.

Having taken a shine to Jim, prim and proper middle-class Annabelle strikes up an unlikely friendship with him, based on wanting to escape the stifling constraints of the small talk her world revolves around.

Instead she wants to tap into the deep reservoir of the sort of swear words her husband would have known before becoming a respectable businessman.

As premises go, it's unlikely, and Maxwell's comedy is little more than a diverting if hugely enjoyable entertainment, but he manages to inject it with lightly-managed nuggets of philosophical inquiry into semantics and our use of language.

It also doesn't do any harm at all that the piece, which is ably directed by Orla O'Loughlin, is played to perfection by Tope and Fletcher.

Were I to try and quote in print some of the lines that are on show here, chances are the asterisk button on my keyboard would seize up.

Suffice to say the play is full of very rude words indeed, and the comedy all the more rudely hilarious for it.

Just go and see it and you'll know what I mean.

Sponsored by Heineken

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