If you're going to stage an exploration of grief, then the bereavement of Jesus's disciples following his crucifixion is, as Steve Lambert puts it, "up there with the best of them".

The founder of Badac, a theatre company specialising in "extreme political art", for eight years Lambert has been producing intense, physical and thoroughly researched work, inspired by human rights abuses.

Last year, Ashes To Ashes, Badac's chilling three-hander about the Holocaust, left the Nightingale audience in stunned silence.

This year they're taking another swing at complacency with a play which concludes "the Christian religion, its philosophies and ideas, were born from grief, violence and insanity".

"It's true," says Lambert. "If Jesus hadn't died, we'd have a completely different system. But grief is a form of insanity, and I don't think insanity is necessarily a negative label. In this country, when you go to a funeral, everyone is trying to control themselves. When you see a Middle-Eastern funeral, the women are screaming, making sounds they'd never normally make."

Beginning with Christ being beaten towards the cross, Lunatics fills a mysterious hole left by scripture in imagining the first regrouping of his main disciples, and the two women present at his execution.

The staging is stark and brutal, and the only piece of set which travels with Badac is a metal pole.

Critics say this is something to which all serious theatre goers should submit but Lambert is more easy-going. "It's not everyone's cup of tea," he says. "Some people think it's too in-your-face. Fair dos. But I love it. I love the insanity of it, the structured chaos."

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