Firearms and Fingertips @ Royal Exchange Studio, Manchester, 27-30 Nov

Spencer has been shot. He’s lying in a hospital bed, in an operating room. Doctors are swarming all around him, and his mother is waiting desperately at his bedside. It doesn’t look good – Spencer is going into shock. Now enter Chalice and Brown – two agents of death looking to kill some time until the Grim Reaper comes to call – who pull Spencer into their twisted game show, cheerfully called This Is Your Death, and while away the time by messing with his head, pulling him further into their deathly antics.

Such is the plot of Firearms and Fingertips, a dark comedy and very modern tale about the effect of gun crime on society. It’s a grim and serious topic, and at first look this isn’t a play you might imagine yourself laughing through – yet comedy it is, and it incorporates multi-media facets, including a live soundtrack presented by DJ Rasp, to tell its story. Liverpool-born director James Shaw wants to stress that this is a play written to entertain, and that it should be enjoyed despite – or rather, subversively, because of – its grave subject matter. “Hopefully you’re just going to be sitting there laughing, and thinking, why am I laughing?” he says.

While Shaw says it's not written with any particular audience in mind, Firearms and Fingertips is a play about young people – main character and gunshot victim Spencer is only 15 years old. “It’s a play for anyone who wants to see it,” he says, “but it’s under the umbrella of gun crime and things like that – certain circumstances for young people today… access to guns is quite big, especially for young people, they can just get a gun easily. ”

That said, Shaw stresses that he isn’t trying to lecture or patronise his audience. “I just want it to be something that’s good to watch. Especially for young people who wouldn’t normally want to go to theatres. It hasn't got this moralistic lesson in it,” he continues. “It’s got no message – it’s a dark comedy and it’s just got this ‘what happens if you play with guns?’ question.” [Conori Bell-Bhuiyan]