Kemp (Hopkins) and Grace (Cooke) gazing at the world through skew windows. Photograph by Phillip Kuhn.

Think of a solid mix of the myriad hairpin bends in Roald Dahl’s famous unexpected tales, mixed with a touch of Beckettian bizarreness and a perfect sense of surrealism, performed by veteran performers with an empathetic and generous understanding of the universe and many of its quirks and you will appreciate the magic and wisdom in this theatrical fable called Vigil.

Rather than just an essay on death, as the concept seems to imply, it’s one about life and beautifully couples a frank understanding of love – self-love and love of another – with an unflinching sense of black humour and incredibly well crafted succinct prose.

Kemp (Graham Hopkins) is a nephew to a woman he has not seen in over 30 years. He’s a bank clerk. Asexual by his own admission, and clearly lonely to the core, he’s spent his life on the outside of the world looking in.

Grace (Vanessa Cooke) is an elderly woman, on the cusp of death. She knits, she smokes; everything about her seems to be the same dingy shade of beige, with overtures of pinks and greens in between. She likes the good old standards of popular music from the 1940s – Mac the Knife and How Much is that Doggy in the Window, and she’s bedridden.

Enter the spectre of death – metaphorically speaking – and Kemp arrives to see Grace off, in the bluntest of fashions. But one neck-jamming turn in the tale after another leaves you breathless with side-splitting laughter at the foibles and decisions of this unlikely couple.

The play, with its topsy turvy set all strung together, in cohesion, is as funny and heartfelt and developed as the narrative in Hal Ashby’s 1971 tour-de-force Harold and Maude, and it offers deep and bittersweet reflections on the idea of growing old.

Impeccably performed by Cooke and Hopkins, it’s an easy to watch play, but not that easy that it cannot serve as a supremely fine container for some profound truths about life, loneliness and the value of Christmas. In short, it’s a ten out of ten production, not to be missed.

• Vigil by Morris Panych is directed by Christopher Weare and produced by Susan Danford and Stephen Jennings. With production design by Julia Anastaspoulos, it is performed by Vanessa Cooke and Graham Hopkins and it performs at Auto & General Theatre on the Square in Sandton, until June 21. (011)883-8606.