REVIEW: The Silence of Snow: The Life of Patrick Hamilton, Sheffield Playhouse

So when a mobile phone goes off in the venue, quick as a flash he quips: "Steady on, they've not been invented yet."

Similllrly, a sneeze elicits a cheeky "bless you."

Farrelly's ready wit and closeness to the audience in this performance at Sheffield Playhouse embeds us in Hamilton's head as the sad, sordid and tortured tale unfolds.

Not for a second does Farrelly detract from a phenomenal performance - every put down, wisecrack, one-liner or slurp of whisky brings Hamilton alive.

Sheffield-born Farrelly, stunning in an earlier solo show about the artist and film-maker Derek Jarman, is mesmerising.

The play dates from 2014 and was the first Farrelly wrote. Hamilton, born in 1904 from a household where "even the cat wrote novels," was the author of plays Rope and Gaslight, both which became major films, and novels such as Hangover Square.

Successful when still young, Hamilton was a compulsive drinker afflicted by the “black dog” of acute depression which destroyed his life.

On a bare set we meet Hamilton, in a straitjacket, as he awaits the horror of an electro-convulsive therapy session in a hospital, until we see the dying Hamilton for the last time.

Farrelly is a tour de force as a sneering tyrannical father, ineffectual mother, a cockney London prostitute and Hamilton's publisher, in a vast array of characters and scenes, drawing on mime and mimicry. Minor props, such as a pair of glasses, flesh out a frenetic figure, tossed around by his fate.

Farrelly's physical adeptness, falling or leaping, creates an electric atmosphere.

It's dark but here are lot of laughs on this journey, one that includes Hamilton's stalking of fascism-approving actor Geraldine Fitzgerald with whom he was besotted.

At the end, still only 58, The Beatles' 1962 hit Love Me Do playing in the background, Hamilton is hunched, a blanket round his shoulders, dying of sclerosis and kidney failure but still sucking on a whisky bottle.

So Hamilton was not 'cured' by ECG, nor sadly could he escape his own final chapter.