Jo is wearing her wedding dress; bold and distinctive, it’s classy not showy, as fit for a trip to an upmarket restaurant as for the walk down the aisle.  The dress, we soon learn, matches Jo’s down-to-earth personality, but she isn’t going anywhere today.  A little like Miss Havisham, her marriage and her life are on hold – cut off by a sudden and devastating event, by something almost unspeakable which Jo has done.

It’s a compelling hook to hang a story from.  But while Jo’s tale is certainly tragic, this isn’t a classic tragedy: there’s no sense of inevitability about it, no flaw in her character which drives the fateful events.  And so, while Jo blames herself bitterly for the uncharacteristic decisions which triggered the crisis, it’s a cruelly empty kind of regret; a bit like saying that, if you’d given your child just one more hug before they left the house, they wouldn’t have been on the zebra crossing when the speeding car careered down the road.

The brutality of random chance could make a gut-wrenching play, but that’s not the avenue which Human chooses to explore.  Instead, by constructing an edifice of mystery around the exact nature of Jo’s crime, it pins its impact on a big final reveal – a reveal which, I’m sorry to say, I found intensely underwhelming.  Even after it’s shared its secret, the script goes to tremendous lengths to excuse the likeable Jo.  Her victim proposes the method of his own destruction, and it’s made clear that her actions in the last few calamitous seconds were pretty much out of her hands.

A pity.  But where Human never disappoints is in its portrayal of relationships – between a bride-to-be and her fiancée, a mother and her children, a grown-up daughter and her own interfering mum.  Solo actor Helen Rutter captures each of these figures well, but is most memorable and affecting as Jo: the once-confident woman with a once-perfect life, who feels she’s lost all she had and now daren’t face the everyday world around her.

Again, because the script holds back the secret of what’s in Jo’s mind, it can be difficult at times to connect with her.  But a remembered dream – itself clearly a reworking of an incident from Jo’s past – proves a powerful way of putting yourself in a bereft parent’s shoes; while some interventions from her alarmingly perceptive son are also effective in capturing her enduring grief.  The variety of responses to the tragedy are well-observed too, and there’s a glimmer of redemption in the ending, offering a genuinely surprising reminder that kindness can creep up on you in unexpected ways.

So there’s no faulting Rutter’s performance, and the audience around me were clearly deeply affected by what they saw.  For my part though, I’m afraid I left slightly frustrated.  It’s a sad and believable story – but I feel there’s missed potential to make it something more.