RECALL your childhood. Were there times when, trying to get to sleep, you sensed that something incomprehensibly awful was happening or about to happen? And then, when you came downstairs to air your amorphous dreads, were you silenced by adults who seemed neither to be saying what they meant nor meaning what they said? If so, you should respond to the play that David Mamet wrote in 1994, long after he was a sensitive, misused, insecure ten-year-old in the Chicago of 1959, just like his protagonist here.

It may seem odd to call Oliver Coopersmith’s bright, inquisitive John the protagonist when the cast also consists of Kim Cattrall as his mother and Douglas Henshall as her gay friend, but that’s Mamet’s view and that’s the impression left by Josie Rourke’s revival.

Again and again the boy comes down the long stairs leading from his bedroom. When will Dad come home? Doesn’t his father realise that they’re going on a fishing trip together the next day? Are the spectral voices that he thinks he hears just outside his door trying to tell him something?

They surely are. Cattrall’s Donny smilingly opens a letter and discovers that her husband, Robert, has ditched her. Henshall’s Del comforts her, but he’s playing a double game, as he probably was when he urged young John to play creative games with his father in the woods. He knows that Robert has been having an affair. He lent him his home for sex. Maybe he even knew that Robert was about to desert his wife and son. All along he has vowed a deep friendship for Donny, but friendship seldom comes falser than this.

One of Mamet’s recurrent themes — remember his movie, House of Games, or his study of real-estate sharks, Glengarry Glen Ross? — is deception. But it’s not only Robert and Del who are arch-deceivers. Donny, too, fobs off or shuts up her son when he asks pertinent questions or precociously wonders what’s true and what’s illusory.

“Go to sleep,” both she and Del keep saying, but he won’t and can’t, perhaps because he realises that the aim is to anaesthetise his mind.

I liked the play more than when I saw it at its premiere 12 years ago. Then I thought that Mamet’s hesitant, elliptical, fragmented dialogue came close to self-parody. But this time it’s clearly the language of people who are stumbling about in the ontological fog or, as the title suggests, trying to solve the cryptograms of their lives.

The piece now seems as poignant and upsetting as an exercise in retrieved memory on the psychiatrist’s couch. And for that all three performers must share responsibility. Master Coopersmith, one of three pre-adolescents alternating the role of John, is clever, callow and as puzzled as one of Henry James’s over-experienced innocents.

Henshall is needy, nervous and, like many of Mamet’s characters, quick to offload blame for his behaviour on a bad world and a human species supposedly as weak and corrupt as himself.

Cattrall begins as a 1950s Stepford wife and faintly exasperated mother, becomes plausibly shattered and distraught, and ends up very angry indeed. Angry not just at the betrayals of adult men, but at her half-comprehending son.

Suddenly she turns on John, who again can’t fulfil his promise to go to sleep. The rejected woman spits out her pent-up venom at the rejected boy. A painful end to a fascinating play.

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