I consider Worth to be one of the nastiest plays I have seen recently. Based in an Anglo Chinese family after the death of their mother, four siblings assemble for her funeral and to divide her inheritance. They are Jacob (Arthur Lee) recently released from prison, Penny (Jennifer Lim) who is Anthony (Leo Buckley)’s mother, Ted a dentist (Stephen Hoo) and the youngest of the siblings, Dr Rev May Wang (Sara Chia-Jewell). They have not seen each other for eighteen years as May lives in America and Jacob has been detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure. A portrait of the inscrutable mother/grandmother hangs over them on the wall.

The very short first act of a half hour or less has much to laugh at, jokes where the relatives deprecate one another but, after time, the complete lack of empathy felt for any of the characters started to weigh with me. Jacob’s riff is to persistently call his nephew Anthony by another male name starting with A, a bit of a comic cliché these days.

I liked the opening scene with its lighting coup and the five characters falling backwards in slow motion as if they were being sucked into a sink hole but at every time lapse, this device becomes a tad tiresome. Anthony is very rude to his mother and she never seems to complain about it. We suspect this is deference to the male sex, even towards her own son. The other relatives though complain about Anthony’s behaviour and urge Penny to discipline him.

The tensions of this family gathering take moments to rise to the surface, but at the mention of money everything is heightened. Ted the affluent dentist in his checked suit delivers the bad news that their mother had £44 and some pennies in her bank accounts and that they are due £11 each. The paucity of this revelation causes upset all round with Ted and Penny talking about how much money they had given their mother over the years.