The theatre has given us mutilation, Titus Andronicus comes to mind, and cannibalism in Thyestes and Sweeney Todd, but as far as I am aware there is no dramatic genre based on organ donorship. After Tommy Murphy’s Mark Colvin’s Kidney, this may well change.

Murphy’s funny and moving play is built around a series of circumstances that would seem to have emerged from the imagination of an absurdist like Ionesco rather than mundane reality, but which actually occurred.

Mary-Ellen Field was a successful Australian business consultant working in London; her stable of clients included Elle Macpherson. Disaster struck when that ultimate purveyor of sleaze, Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World, published intimate details of Macpherson’s private life, details which we now know were hacked. At the time, it seemed that the information could only have come from Field. Reputation shredded, she was encouraged to enter a rehabilitation centre where she was branded alcoholic and bipolar. When the hacking scandal broke, she sued News International and failed. The distinguished ABC journalist Mark Colvin, who had been following the phone hacking scandal, contacted Field. In her darkest hours, she drew comfort from Colvin’s interest and guidance. On learning that he was seriously ill and on a dialysis machine, Field offered him one of her kidneys – an offer made to a man she was yet to meet.