Awake, by The Awake Project, is a startling 70 minutes of theatre focusing on a charismatic and hugely successful doctor’s shattering revelation of a secret long hidden from his friends — an unpleasant assortment of what used to be called yuppies — and from his family. He is soon to die, of pancreatic cancer.

To no one is Max’s announcement — in the middle of his birthday party — more horrifying than to his wife Vendela (Maria Sendow) who is shortly to give birth to the child they have long been hoping for.

Contributing powerfully to the pain she feels is her outrage at his not confiding in her. The physical expression of her anger, as she pounds on the dying man’s chest, is hard to watch unflinchingly.

But watch we have to, for The Awake Project — a seven-strong group of multi-skilled performers with a strong contingent of Swedes among them — demands from its audience all the attention and involvement that its name would seem to imply.

Theirs is a mixed-media approach under director Christopher Sivertsen, designed to point up the mental anguish experienced by Max and illustrate his rich fantasy life. This involves words (writer Edward Kemp) and music (sung and played live as well as recorded) and a strong circus element.

Well-executed routines are performed by the actors at either end of a suspended rope on a pulley. Those of Oliviero Papi, playing Max, and the lavishly muscled Pelle Holst, as one of his court of sycophants, are the most athletic, with each taking turns to hoist the other to the top of a large cupboard whose subdivided interior at other times houses the whole cast. This proved to be a challenging, demanding show for those watching as well as those performing. For this audience member, Max’s roll call of celebrities killed by pancreatic cancer — Steve Jobs, Patrick Swayze and Bill Hicks among them — confirmed an impression that the illness is no longer the rarity it was once considered.

There were others in the North Wall audience, too, who must have recalled with me a recent high-profile case of pancreatic cancer in Oxford. This also involved a doctor. Dignity in Dying co-sponsored the first Anne McPherson memorial lecture a day or so before the show.