CHAMBER maid Amy finds yet another corpse in a hotel room. Storage unit manager Jim is growing suspicious of the smell coming from one of his units. Businesswoman Kate discovers a female body while walking the dog.

Then add a fourth body but still only three stories, without giving too much away about Laura Wade’s 90-minute play Breathing Corpses, now part of the Yorkshire season at York Theatre Royal on account of Laura being born in Sheffield.

York Settlement Community Players are presenting the York premiere of this Olivier Award-nominated play, a murderous jigsaw puzzle of death, despair and domestic violence, in the Studio from Wednesday.

Settlement’s community cast is being directed by Anna-Siobhan Wilcox, who was responsible last year for Mooted Theatre Co’s Victorian English twist on Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler.

“For a long time, Settlement had said they wanted me to direct for them, even before Hedda, and then they saw Hedda and said ‘we definitely want you to direct for us’,” says 28-year-old Anna.

“I submitted ten plays as they were looking for something for the Yorkshire season in a slot that was coming up in the Studio. Ironically, I didn’t know Breathing Corpses was a Yorkshire play as I didn’t know about Laura’s Sheffield connection, whereas the others were pieces like Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads and a play by Hull playwright Tom Wells.

“Settlement chose Breathing Corpses and actually it’s more suited to me as a director because my background is in experimental theatre. Anything that’s dark, violent and sexual is my territory and this play has all three.”

Anna had been introduced to Laura Wade’s work by Theatre Royal youth theatre director Kate Plumb. “She brought Colder Than Here, Laura’s first play, to a youth theatre session. That one was also about death, funerals and the type of funeral you might like to have,” she recalls.

“So from that beginning, I looked for some of Laura’s other scripts and found this one, her second play, which is expertly crafted and saturated in observational wit and painful humanity.”

Breathing Corpses is set against the backdrop of mundane modern existence, its events unfolding out of sequence, infused with black humour in the grimmest of circumstances.

“It’s an imaginative exploration of the thin divide between life and death and the aftermath of death on the living,” says Anna. “But it’s not bleak; it does have a sense of humour, which we really play on, and it’s beautifully written.

“It’s very Pulp Fiction. Laura describes it as being the perfect circle: a thriller with a circular form.”

You have to tackle the subject of death sensitively, Anna suggests. “The approach you take is based on the attitude to death, not the death itself. We’ve done a little work on grief and bereavement, but more significantly there’s a character who’s psychologically traumatised and suffers from post-traumatic stress,” says Anna.

She is working with a cast of seven, the experienced Paul Osborne, Helen Wilson and Clancy McMullan, the blossoming young talents of Nathan Unthank, Jon Adams and Anna Soden, and a name that was new to Anna, Jamie McKeller.

Appropriately, he is playing a mystery man, Charlie. “I met Jamie for the first time at the auditions, when he was one of 50 people who came along and was a complete unknown to me,” says Anna.

“He turned out to be a film-maker, based in York, who does the I Am Tim mock-documentary web series. His film-making is based in horror, comedy, monsters and vampires – so his advice on the blood and guts and gore has been really helpful.”

• York Settlement Community Players present Breathing Corpses, York Theatre Royal Studio, Wednesday to March 16, 7.45pm and 2pm Saturday matinees. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk Please note: suitable for age 14 plus.