TERROR is within and without in this 100-minute play by Jane Bodie. On Patrick Connellan’s stark apartment set, with its view of the London skyline, two relationships disintegrate in the wake of a 9/11-style attack. Set in the near future, the drama shows how ripples of shock and horror can alter personal perspectives permanently, and how an individual’s appropriation and abuse of power over another causes devastation even in the supposedly safe sphere of the domestic.

Thanks to an adroit structural twist, the terrorist act both begins and ends the play. We first meet the twentysomethings Michelle and Scott towards the end of their toxic partnership, and each scene in which we encounter them again takes us backwards in time, towards their first meeting in a London pub on the day of the attack.

Simultaneously, the story of Neil and Clea, their slightly older and more moneyed counterparts, begins with their breathless relief in discovering that both have arrived home from the scene of destruction apparently unscathed, and proceeds chronologically. Both relationships are defined by violence; but as Clea and Neil move away from each other, we watch Scott and Michelle turn from the alienated, damaged people they will become to the sweetly smitten pair they once seemed to be.

Anthony Clark’s production has a hypnotic low-key intensity, well suited to Bodie’s cool, precise treatment of an emotive subject. We never see the savage beatings Scott inflicts on Michelle — the sight of her, trembling and terrified, in their aftermath, is all the more powerful. The two couples’ offstage existences intersect when Clea witnesses Michelle being viciously assaulted by Scott in a supermarket; she describes the incident to Neil, and it is quietly sickening. And while Clea’s efforts to distract Neil with gossip, sex and semillon from the horrors he witnessed on the day of the attack seem ignoble in the face of his awakened social conscience, they conceal grief and despair at the way in which their lives have been changed forever.

Tom Brooke as Scott affectingly suggests the damaged young man behind the manipulative thug, who reduces Christine Bottomley’s Michelle from a sparky young woman into a creature of agonising frailty. Equally good are Ian Dunn as the traumatised Neil and Rachel Sanders as the glossy Clea, watching her world slide away from her. This is a work of delicate force that reminds you of the fragility of all our self-constructed realities.

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