Back when the death of the family was mere abstraction, plays like Ian Rowlands's darkly bleak meditation on love, sex and death would probably have been considered voguishly shocking. These days we're so numb to things that to create a real-life play for today without stating the obvious is hard work.

Blue Heron in the Womb begins in the front parlour, where domestic calm seems to reign. Mother cuts sandwiches as if for a picnic, while twin sisters, Lizzie and Chrissy, iron their Sunday best and father sits in repose.

But the shadow of death hangs over them all in the form of Lizzie's dead baby's ashes, which have quite literally been gathering dust for a year prior to this funeral rite. More ominous is the presence of Alex, the man loved by both sisters. Throughout a series of poetically eroticised monologues, a family at war - with themselves as much with each other - is laid bare as skins are shed and old

wounds opened.

''Take me to a land of memories,'' says Alex, and this is exactly what Rowlands does in his production for Cardiff's Theatre Y Byd.

Impressionistically gothic, things start off concentrating on the twins - equal but different, like Sweet Valley High gone wrong - but soon embrace every rotting repressive limb of family fortunes gone adrift, as one by one each life is ripped asunder. Stark simplicity is exchanged for tricksiness later on, but if there's too many ideas in the pot to make full sense of things, it's delivered with still intensity by a five-strong cast. There's even a nod to Stevie Smith as the mother wades out to her fate, not so much a fisher of men, but catching her death nevertheless.