OLD age is more than just the winding down of a life. Far from being a benign process, ambling quietly toward its logical conclusion, it inevitably entails increasing amounts of grief.

Such grief usually takes the form of that most common trapping of old age: bereavement.

And just as a funeral needs a body, so bereavement implies a family.

Rodney Clark's Moving Susan takes the well-worn scenario of death within the family and examines the conflicts, tensions, and attempts of the ones left behind to pick up the pieces and carry on.

When loved ones - especially, as in this case, if they are father-figures - suddenly start to pass-away, long-established order and a lifetime's stability can be shattered in an instant.

Once stable relationships are spun into disarray. Buried emotional grievances bubble to the surface.

The hot tears of loss smear the looking glass of familial bliss and love quickly gives way to bitterness and distrust.

Moving Susan does not indulge in the sort of infighting and over-blown theatrics that would characterise a Greek tragedy or episode of Dallas, however.

More, it skirts around the arena of the family feud, never fully committing itself and retaining no small amount of integrity because of this.

The play exhibits a pleasing subtlety and realism that is often foregone in favour of more meretricious attempts at fostering intrigue; where the overtly salacious or faintly ludicrous take the place of truthful observation and the appreciation of the prosaic and everyday, which are never really sensational nor clearly defined.

Focusing for the most part on Susan (Zena Walker), the story covers the 18 months following the death of her husband, Paul, and her subsequent attempts to adjust to life without him.

Her two children descend on the large, now empty house, in Sussex, wrenched from their disparate lives and thrust back into a unit that they have both outgrown and is now broken and incomplete, anyway.

There is the eldest daughter Alison (Clare Burt), the professional neurotic who's married to Brussels, cigarettes and an impotent husband.

There's Colin (Ian Targett), her younger brother, the promiscuous salesman who at first appears duplicitous - both towards his mother and her wealth - but then emerges as the genuinely concerned son.

And there is the curious figure of Mina (Hannah Creswell), the ex-nurse, fresh from a mental breakdown, who comes to live with Susan, offering her an unlikely companionship at a time when both their mental faculties seem to be in question.

Each bring their own very ordinary troubles to a very unremarkable situation, yet the blanket accessibility of the subject is a joy to watch.

At times it is funny, sometimes predictably and cornily so, but the warmth and believability of the characters pull the proceedings above cliché.

The pig-headedness of Susan is endearing and idiosyncratic, and the disputes and sibling skirmishes never appear contrived.

The play could almost have been written by an Alan Bennett come south.

Because, although the play isn't imbued with his trademark sense of parochial alienation, it certainly covers the same thematic terrain.

Loss, loneliness, and the incredible stresses that old age can place on the family are all explored with feeling and an understated passion.

Moving Susan is showing at the Haymarket Theatre, Basingstoke, from February 23 to March 17. Tickets start from £10.00.

Steve Berriman