Its contents are unpleasant. Very, very unpleasant.
The Gift opens with Colin, sister Lisa (Laura Haddock) and her husband Brian (Alex Price) staring with fixed horror into the receptacle which bears the branding of a local patisserie.
So begins weeks of descent down a crazy rabbit hole of speculation over the culprit’s motivation and identity.
Colin tries to dredge from his memory all the people that, even as a child, he might have upset. Along the way, the audience is kept on its collective toes with carefully crafted plot twists and surprises.
Colin’s spiral is watched with growing horror and concern by Lisa and Brian who try and talk him out of his quest and urge him to put the revolting delivery behind him.
When Colin shows them the evidence boards (all string, ribbons, post it notes and photographs) on the inside of his kitchen cupboards, they realise the quest has tipped over into a dangerous, self-destructive obsession.
Over two hours, Dave Florez’s sharp, witty and perfectly paced script had the Park Theatre audience in gales of laughter. Questioning her brother’s growing fixation, Lisa snaps “A Mission!? You’re not f*cking Greta Thunberg!”
Alex Price’s deadpan deliver is superb: “F*ck the police, what did the bomb squad do?”
And Burns has perfect comic timing, his Colin has strong echoes of a David Mitchell-style character, all middle-class righteousness, outrage and self-justification.
As a piece of work, The Gift slots into the space occupied by sit-com Not Going Out and countless 6.30pm Radio 4 comedies about professional thirty-somethings having a bit of a crisis, dipping into their inner child and behaving erratically as chaos ensues.
Adam Meggido, a gifted improviser in his own right and directorial veteran of the Goes Wrong brand, steers a terrific cast to conjure a joyfully absurd, laugh-out loud evening.
The Gift runs at Park Theatre in Finsbury Park until March 1.
