The Jewish children of Nazi Germany wrote poems and drew pictures even as they waited in queues for the gas ovens. In the deepest despair there is often a glimmer of hope, in the face of annihilation there is a human need to mark our presence. So it is for Spoonface, an eight-year-old autistic girl dying of cancer. Alone, listening to opera arias, she faces her own death and the fact that after we are gone there is nothing, "not even a hole somewhere where I used to be."

Lee Hall's monologue, a philosophical inquiry into what it means to be human, was written for radio. It subsequently became a TV film and now arrives on stage with the estimable Kathryn Hunter as the queer, isolated child who understands everything and nothing of the world but whose skewed insights into her own plight and that of her warring, grieving parents, contain a good deal more truth than a thousand lectures on the nature of existence.

Hunter is a mature woman, but here she is the embodiment of an autistic child with a jerky body and a face that is both like a wizened monkey and the skin on a baby's bottom. She is ancient, yet untouched.

At times, as she endlessly rearranges the spoons that lent her her nickname, and listens to "the poor ladies who die so well" she gives the impression of someone fading away in front of our eyes. Her skin is paper white as if she is lit from within. She is incandescent. It is like watching a ghost.

Even with a performance as exceptional as this, I can't help feeling that the play was best on radio. When it was implicit rather than explicit, less specific so therefore more universal.

Still, it would be a stone heart that could not squeeze a tear, if not for Spoonface, then for ourselves and our need to shout, "I was here" before the darkness finally descends.