“Impassioned” is a handy item of reviewers’ shorthand. It generally means something along the lines of a character, or an actor’s portrayal of him/her, being deeply caring but just as deeply angry about caring. Pretty much everyone in The Seven Acts Of Mercy is seriously impassioned.

There’s the artist Caravaggio in 17th-century Naples, using ordinary people’s faces in the work which gives Anders Lustgarten’s play its title (inspired by Matthew 25:36-37); his life-model Lavinia, a whore and herself a painter; and Vincenzo, the churchman who has commissioned the canvas. Meanwhile (in stage time), in present-day Bootle, witness three generations of the Carragher family: old-school leftie Leon, teaching his grandson some guiding principles through classic art, principally (of course) the Caravaggio; grandson Mickey, who sets out to execute the seven acts for himself and turn them into his own phone-cam artwork; and between them, estranged father Lee, now returned to make a quick and only partially legal buck in enforced housing redevelopment. (Not to mention almost all Mickey’s photographic/charity subjects and Lee’s less conscientious, more physical associates.)

Housing – the intensity of its economic significance and the apparent outright malice of successive governments’ approach to social housing crises – is the emblem for Lustgarten and director Erica Whyman of a whole basket of social iniquities. Lustgarten has something of a record as impassioned himself: his programme biog declares that “He’s a long-standing political activist who’s been arrested in four continents.” Patrick O’Kane is fearsomely impassioned as Caravaggio; O’Kane can probably be impassioned under anaesthesia. Tom Georgeson, who plays Leon, is a giant of an actor for whom impassioned-even-on-his-deathbed is no challenge.

If all this seems flippant, it is only as a way of warding off becoming not just impassioned myself but downright incandescent about the political climate of harshness indicted by the play. Whyman’s production is the best I have seen from her since she arrived at Stratford as the RSC’s deputy artistic director with particular responsibility for contemporaneity. Her staging is urgent, even through what could easily be a series of hobbling scene changes. Tom Piper’s design overlooks proceedings with a series of huge projections of the painting in progress.

Written for the Financial Times.