When London’s avant-garde Independent Theatre tried to cast the wife in Strindberg’s Father in the 1890s, every actress gave the same answer. How can you ask me to play that “awful role”? And that’s partly why the Swedish dramatist remained off the British map for another 30 years. Not until 1929 did The Father get the production and Strindberg the recognition they merited.

But Angus Jackson’s fine revival, with Teresa Banham as the killer-wife Laura and Jasper Britton as her tormented prey, fully confirms the play’s power to rivet and disturb. When he was writing the play, Strindberg said that he feared it would leave him “shrivelled up either in madness and agony or in suicide”, and this time one believes him. Here’s a play that concerns paranoia — and was written by the most paranoid dramatist who ever drew a pen to slay a character.

As Banham makes apparent in as earnestly unaggressive a performance as the lady can have received, Laura has her point of view. How can Britton’s Adolf, who is a rationalist and aspiring scientist as well as an army captain, insist on sending their daughter Bertha to a secular boarding school against the wishes of the God-fearing wife who looks after her and wishes her to study art locally? But as one would expect of the dramatist who would write Miss Julie, Comrades and The Dance of Death, misogyny soon asserts itself, and any semblance of balance disappears.

Banham can do little to humanise the “awful” woman who plots, lies and destroys, sending Adolf’s superiors letters suggesting that he’s insane and, intentionally or not, driving him mad herself with the suggestion that he’s not Bertha’s father. As if this wasn’t enough, Strindberg has to have her tell him how much sex with him disgusts her and how she’s happy only when she’s mother and he her emasculated son.

And Britton’s Adolf? Early on, he has a long moment of abstraction in which you sense the first pricking of the fears that will inexorably escalate into an agony of doubt and self-destructive violence. He is, of course, weaker than his wife: which is especially poignant since he’s also very much the commanding husband and tough, strict army officer. And then there he is on on the ground, writhing like some tortured insect in the straitjacket into which Strindbergian womanhood has clapped him: the inevitable end of a passionate, focused and wholly brilliant performance.

Box office: 01243 781312