The day after Coventry football supporters packed the city’s streets for the Championship-winning team’s open-top bus parade, it felt entirely fitting to be celebrating another phoenix-from-the flames local success story.

Poor tells the remarkable rags-to-riches tale of Katriona O’Sullivan, who was born and raised in Hillfields, a deprived inner-city area close to the football team’s original Highfield Road stadium, endured a childhood marked by poverty and neglect, but is now a highly respected author and psychology professor in Ireland.

None of it came easy. Born into hardship, her early years were blighted by drug addiction (her parents) and sexual abuse (at the hands of her ‘uncle’), teenage pregnancy, homelessness and later alcoholism as a young adult.

Not surprisingly O’Sullivan’s best-selling memoir can be a tough read, but Sonya Kelly’s adaptation still manages to find fun and light in the darkness, despite remaining so steadfastly faithful to the original text that pages of the book are referenced throughout - O’Sullivan is an academic after all. And if her story is extraordinary, then the stage version delivers a similarly impressive impact, Róisín McBrinn’s energetic direction and Aedín Cosgrove’s minimalist set hugely effective in providing a platform (more often than not in the form of a sofa) for the ensemble cast to deliver the compelling narrative.

Their performances are exemplary throughout, with Aisling O’Mara and 10-year-old Holly Lawlor especially affecting as Katriona and her younger self respectively. The two regularly share the stage in an inspired move that enables us to join the dots between innocent child and the damaged adult she became, as well as see how each iteration has influenced the other, and continues to do so. The latter regularly looks out for her younger self - fulfilling the role of mother in the way her real one never did - but the tables are turned when the seven-year-old girl cajoles her older self into overcoming an alcohol-driven setback and sit her university exams.

Much of the play is dark, painful and raw - it’s hard to dress up rape, drug abuse and rehab altercations - but there’s light between the clouds too, in the form of music (Kelly makes Fleetwod Mac’s Rumours a crucial touch point), an array of colourful characters who flit in and around Katriona’s life, and occasional glimpses of positive childhood memories, not least when the family gather round the TV to watch Coventry City win the FA Cup in 1987.

The football team and its ‘Play up Sky Blues’ anthem are regular motifs throughout, which not only adds to the tale’s quirky authenticity but highlights how all communities can come together and support each other. There’s no getting away from the fact that this is a truly personal story, but O’Sullivan wants it to become a call to action to those in a position to help the ones being left behind. Whether that happens is debatable, but what isn’t in doubt is that this is a gripping piece of contemporary theatre by and about a woman who lived but didn’t die in this town.

4 stars

Reviewed by Steve Adams at the Belgrade Theatre. Coventry, on Tuesday 5 May. Poor continues to show at the venue until Saturday 11 May.