Dean Gilmour and Michele Smith seem to have a thing for consumptives. Both Anton Chekhov, the inspiration for their well-received Chekhov's Shorts, and Katherine Mansfield — whose stories have been adopted this time around — succumbed to fatal strains of tuberculosis.

New Zealander Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) made her home in bohemian London, where she produced short stories of such quality that they earned the envy of Virginia Woolf. Mansfield, in turn, admired Chekhov's work, making this new show a convenient progression for Theatre Smith-Gilmour.

The Mansfield Project adapts four of the author’s short stories in the company’s signature Commedia dell’arte style. We see spinster sisters coming to grips with their father’s death; a schoolgirl’s erotic equestrian daydream; a mother’s heartbreak at the loss of her soldier-son; and the cruel slaying of a duck.

Mansfield’s fiction comes out well though the Gilmour-Smith wringer, especially in moments that plunge into the characters’ subconscious. The troop’s physicality makes the everyday emotive: a flurry of cacophonous meringue-crunching, for example, conveys profound uncertainty on the eve of hysterical grief.

The acting is variable. Oddly, Claire Calnan and Adam Paolozza — the supporting team — provide far more grounded performances than the sometimes histrionic company founders. Calnan is particularly adept at displaying the melodrama of her characters without compromising Mansfield’s intended restraint.

Some stories work better than others: “The Daughter of the Late Colonel,” which opens the show, is the strongest narrative in the line-up, but the final story, “Six Years After,” is the best actuated on stage, thanks in particular to Kimberly Purtell’s moody lighting, which encapsulates the seaside atmosphere exquisitely. Still, these are stirring vignettes, and this is inventive, enjoyable theatre. Consumption, it appears, can do wonders for the imagination.