It was intriguing to see a couple of male audience members scuttle hastily for the exit during the action of this fine new drama from Polly Teale for Shared Experience. In the most reductive terms, Mine could be seen as a “woman’s play”, with its subject matter of motherhood and longing for a baby. Yet those early leavers missed a sensitively handled panorama of emotions about what it means to be part of a family and to want to create a new one.

Man (Alistair Petrie) and Woman (Katy Stephens) lead the sort of high-flying, immaculately kempt urban life that is the perpetual envy of the harried and child-burdened. A child is what they most want, though, and they have a chance to adopt the newborn baby girl of a drug-using prostitute, Rose (Lorraine Stanley, in a part with uncanny echoes of her role in the film London to Brighton). Rose, however, is determined to get— and keep — herself clean, which will prevent social services taking Beauty away from her.

Teale directs her own impressively ethereal production, making skilled use of video projection and Shared Experience’s trademark physicality. A doll’s house stands at one side of the largely bare stage and a girl in a white dress wafts about it. She could be Woman many years previously, or Beauty a few years hence but she’s certainly a powerful reminder of the fragility and transitoriness of childhood.

It’s all to Teale’s credit that she keeps us rooting equally for the conflicting desires of both Woman and Rose as the pair strike up an uneasy alliance. Both Stephens and Stanley are superb in their varying degrees of hope and anguish, and there is strong support from Clare Lawrence Moody as Woman’s Sister, perpetually exhausted by her fractious offspring.

Until 25 October (020 7722 9301). www.hampsteadtheatre.com