Melanie Klein was a pioneering psychologist in the Twenties and Thirties. Iconoclastic and theoretically adventurous, she made an especially significant contribution to the understanding of children’s fantasies and sensitivities.

Klein’s beliefs were informed by her own experience as a mother, and Nicholas Wright’s play, skilfully revived here by Thea Sharrock, imagines the relationship between her ideas and her everyday practice.

The action takes place in the Viennese émigré’s blood-red London study. It’s spring 1934, and she is busy with a new book. At the same time she is struggling to come to terms with the recent death of her grown-up son. Superficially she is poised but combustive emotions lurk within.

Clare Higgins’s Klein is a tyrannical figure, controlled yet wilful. Her filing cabinet has separate drawers for the Ego and the Id; she believes in regimenting everything she can, though the play shows that a totally compartmentalised life is impossible.

She has strained relationships with her daughter Melitta, who used to be her patient and is now her rival, and with her student Paula, a quiet refugee who at first looks like a goody-goody yet turns out to be not only pretty wily but also a kind of moral adjudicator.

The drama is a psychological power struggle between the three, in which their initially well-defined roles become ambiguous.

Wright’s play is a rich one for performers. When Higgins’s Klein throws her wine in Melitta’s face the gesture, which could seem overblown, is satisfyingly outrageous, and it’s typical of a performance that is narcissistically unpleasant yet also is compellingly sympathetic.

Zoe Waites is vehement and demonstrative but also genuinely fascinating as Melitta, and Nicola Walker endows Paula with both gravity and a suggestive, almost prophetic glow.

This is a thoughtfully conceived production, a treat for admirers of fine acting — hence the four stars.

Nevertheless, Wright’s erudite play contains too much talk. There is an excess of psychoanalytic terminology, including some leaden stuff about “symbolic urine” and “persecutory delusion”. And while this gets laughs, there’s a persistent sense that Mrs Klein is cerebral rather than wise.
Until 5 December.
Information: 020 7359 4404.