How do you talk about the loss and finality of death to a child?

British playwright Mike Kenny makes a good start with Walking The Tightrope, a gentle and tender play aimed at kids between five and eight.

Its simple story deals with five-year-old Esme (Sharmila Dey), whose annual seaside visit to her grandparents is different this year. Grandad Stan (Wayne Robson) meets her, but she can’t find Nana Queenie. Stan tells her that Queenie has gone to join the circus. But the arrival of a real circus forces him to reveal the truth: Queenie has died.

Through the repetition of dialogue and a melodic song (music by Mike Ross), Kenny explores the fact that some things change and some remain the same, echoed by the song’s refrain of the ebb and flow of the tide.

While the storytelling is straightforward – sometimes the actors narrate in the third person, sometimes they become the characters – adult viewers will catch moments of sophistication, such as Stan’s nervousness in telling the truth. In fact, it’s the perceptive Esme who first names the elephant in the room by using the word “dead.” If the enormity of the loss doesn’t quite sink in during the course of the play, that’s realistic, too.

The story itself is a clever blend of the familiar reality of family love and the fantasy that many kids have had of running off to join the circus.

Director Thomas Morgan Jones and his cast know how to hold their young audience, who sit a few feet from the action at the edge of a sand-and-shell shoreline. The artists invite us into the world of the brief play (it runs slightly more than half an hour) with an engaging charm, helped by the chemistry between Robson and Dey.

The show is filled with sights, sounds and smells of the seaside and the grandparents’ house, specifics with which young audiences can identify. Set designer Kelly Wolf’s wraparound coastal vista is also winning, and the visit to the circus has its own magic in the hands of Wolf and lighting designer Geoff Bouckley.