DEATH is just the beginning for Pauline Goldsmith in this fantastic one-woman show from the Arches Theatre Company. It's a starting point for a hugely original, probably unique, piece of theatre.

First there's a wake - with whisky and sandwiches for all while the audience crams on to the stage around the coffin as if it were Goldmith's front room in Belfast. It makes the audience become an active part of the whole show, bickering about who gets the best seats and helping to pass round the plates.

And it ends with the audience following the coffin, complete with black-clad pall-bearers, out on to the street to finish the show with bemused onlookers stopping out of respect.

In between, Goldsmith breathes bright shades of life into the dark subject of death. She is a mortician, going through all the different considerations that have to be made in buying a coffin.

She recalls the death of her father, who died while she was young, just as the troubles in Ireland were flaring up. And she remembers her father's words with perfect vision of an innocent child.

It is this child's eye clarity and directness that continues throughout the play which gives it its poignancy.

But it is Goldsmith's performance, equally clear and direct but always changing as she slips from one role to the next, that is really memorable.