THE distinctive form of wonderfully drole humour that appears to be emblematic of the New York suburb of Brooklyn has probably always played a vital role in making light of the dreadful experiences of the Jewish race.

However, its presence does occasionally take you by surprise.

For example, I wouldn’t ordinarily associate razor-sharp repartee with a subject as bleak as the Holocaust, yet this is precisely what director David Grindley has done with Oliver Cotton’s keenly observed piece about fate and retribution.

The past, as the saying goes, does indeed sometimes come back to haunt you. And this is precisely what happens to Joe (Harry Shearer) and his wife Elli (Maureen Lipman), a Jewish couple in their early 70s living their twilight years in quiet contentment.

The setting is Brooklyn in 1986, in the couple’s apartment. Retired Joe still does a little accountancy work but their passion is for ballroom dancing and we see them practising some fancy moves in readiness for a seniors citizens’ competition the following night.

They nag at each other a little but are apparently close and happy with their lot in life. But while Elli is out picking up her ballroom dress, Joe’s brother Billy (John Bowe) arrives. And nothing will ever be the same again… They haven’t seen each other for more than 30 years and the cause of their estrangement is a mystery. But Billy, strangely dressed in a winter coat and a Hawaian shirt, has a confession to make.

While spending the winter at Daytona Beach in Florida, he recognises one of the guards at the concentration camp where all three of them were imprisoned by the Nazis.

It is as if he has seen a ghost… for right in front of him is the man who once shot people on a whim and beat prisoners to death with a spade.

So Billy promptly buys a gun, and after shooting dead former guard Gruber, escapes to seek sanctuary with his brother and his wife.

And little by little, over a table groaning with a messy Chinese takeaway and a bottomless bottle of Scotch, the past starts to reveal itself.

For they are actually all living respective lies, Billy as much as Gruber, hiding past identities and also the dark secrets that go with them.

Lipman and Shearer give superb performances, deftly bridging the emotional chasm in leaping from happy ballroom to concentration camp memories of despair in the space of a single evening.

And Bowe gives a magnificent performance as he majestically captures Billy’s manic mixture of elation and self-doubt, seeking solace in the false euphoria of alcohol as a thoroughly traumatised Elli suddenly finds her past starting to unravel before her very eyes.

This is a bitter-sweet play in which the audience is obliged to run a whole gamut of emotions and is most certainly highly recommended. Daytona runs until Saturday.