In her significant career as a novelist Edna O’Brien has both crested the tides of feminism and ignored its currents, revealing with uncomfortable candour how some women in love take the masochist’s role. Her female protagonists tend to be enthralled by men’s thinking and unthinking parts. It comes, therefore, as no surprise that in Triptych, one of her rare excursions into theatre, O’Brien distils a lifetime’s observation of men behaving badly.

Her play does suffer from the triteness of its format and exposition. Yet it transcends these limitations, thanks to Miss O’Brien’s ability to give eloquent voice to sexual jealousy, to Sean Mathias’s brilliantly animated production and Terry Norton’s astonishing performance as a woman who reaches the end of her tether and hangs on in there.

A wife, Pauline, and Brandy, teenage daughter of Henry, a never-seen novelist famed for his books and freelance leching, are presented in streams of revelatory consciousness. These streams turn turbulent whenever the women engineer meetings with Henry’s mistress, Clarissa, a promising actress for whom very few of Henry’s promises come true.

Miss O’Brien does luxuriate in her characters’ opulent high-life as if such lifestyles were inherently interesting. All those holiday retreats, parties, taxis and therapists are detailed without ironical intent. Pauline’s intrusions into Clarissa’s dressing-room beggar belief as, somewhat, does Jessica Ellerby’s daddy-adoring, deflowered, heroin-trying Brandy.

Yet Terry Norton’s sinuous Pauline, sometimes dressed in just a slip and a flimsy covering of self-control, stages a mesmerising emotional striptease of a performance. Raw and racked, beset by curses, howls and tears, eager to put Henry’s errant penis beyond working use, Pauline switches from child-like rage to superior, bitchy malice in the sight of Orla Brady’s handsome, languorous mistress, who shares the wife’s hopeless addiction to Henry. What a relief it is when he does the decent thing and drowns himself.

The scenes, in Mathias’s dynamic traverse-stage production, bolstered by Paul Burgess’s handsomely decked staging, are never reduced to statuesque, spotlit monologues, but flow seamlessly into each other with the ease of a nightmare.

Until 10 May (0844 847 1656)