THEATRE REVIEW: Unnatural Cycles: A Ghost Story at Sheffield Playhouse

“I want to tell you a ghost story – but it is also a true story,” she says at the start, setting the scene for an hour long’s immersion into her life and memories.

Raz pours out salt to create a circle on the stage floor in what reminded me of horror films to ward off evil spirits.

An old house, strange neighbours, a secret passage and a howling dog, all add to the atmosphere, intermingled with the loss of a baby, strained relationships, the existence or otherwise of God — and the joys of apple pie.

Relentlessly bleak, yet totally compelling, Raj uses film and music to create a dreamlike, other-wordly space.

The unnatural cycle of death is explored through the generations.

In fact, the inspiration for it came in a dream the Jerusalem-born vocal artist and theatre-maker had about her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who she interviewed on tape before she died.

Her grandmother’s words provide dialogue.

“We tried to make a better life,” she says, a reference, we learn in the after-show talk, to her marriage to an American soldier following the end of the Second World War.

A recurring melody, a song about making apple pies, hauntingly sears into thoughts and feelings.

A cast aside teddy bear is disembowelled of its stuffing by disembodied hands in one clip.

Mechanised fruit pie production methods provide the background in another.

And then there’s the chilling images of a visit by a Nazi commander to a wartime factory — a factory like the one in Poland where her Jewish grandmother worked 16 hours a day in terrible conditions, learning to recite Catholic prayers to avoid capture and the Auschwitz death camp.

The ghosts here are a stark, increasingly relevant, presence in today’s world of wars and refugees.