REVIEW: Heathers The Musical, Chichester Festival Theatre, until Saturday, November 14, book, music and lyrics by Kevin Murphy and Laurence O’Keefe, based on the film written by Daniel Waters, directed by Andy Fickman.

Pleas for decency and compassion don’t come more brutal or hard hitting than Heathers – the very antithesis of the kind of frothy high school stories we have been fed down the years.

Heathers takes all the unmentionables that most other shows tiptoe around and tramples right through them, embracing bad taste at every opportunity as it delivers a revenge fantasy turned nightmare.

Veronica Sawyer (superb from Gerardine Sacdalan) is desperate to make her way through the vicious jungle of her time at school. She decides the best way is to cosy up to the super bitchy Heathers (great work from Liberty Stottor, Jessica Ibadin and Lou Henry) who rule the roost with their affected ways and bullying behaviour.

When Veronica realises the compromises she is going to have to make, she backs off, out of the frying pan into the fire, into the world of the mysterious JD (excellent from Louis Hearsey).

Somehow their way ahead becomes a brutal killing spree, with successive murders passed off as suicide in a ghastly world where the victims become cult figures, venerated for taking the lives they did not actually take.

Heathers is black comedy at its best, shocking and thought-provoking events presented through the most cheery songs as human and high-school wickedness is laid bare.

It’s a show that goes back some years, to the film which started it all.

You wonder how, in today’s even crueller world of social media and amid a seemingly endless stream of high-school shootings, they can possibly get away with a show such as this. But somehow they do, even though it’s frequently very uncomfortable watching.

There can’t be many shows around more daring than Heathers. But it carries it off with immense skill in its delivery, a complete refusal to obey the niceties and cracking performances all round.

The Heathers novices among us in the audience will probably take quite a while to work out what we actually truly thought of it, but there is no denying that it’s bold and incredibly striking.