Drama doesn’t come much richer or stranger than this death-bed lament by the Irish playwright Marina Carr. Ravishing in its dense, literary language, it is as visceral as it is intellectual. Given a contained yet electrifying theatricality by Ramin Gray’s compelling production, with a towering central performance by Fiona Shaw, it lingers not only in the ear and brain, but in the imagination and the gut.

Woman, mother of eight and wife to a faithless husband, lies in pain on snowy pillows. Around her stalks Scarecrow, a sharp-tongued female in silky nightdress and heels. Woman longs to expire in style, like a flower-strewn Ophelia; Scarecrow berates her for her life’s squandered opportunities. Ominous sounds emanate from the wardrobe. There’s something nameless and nasty in there, and soon Woman must surrender to it.

Along with Shakespeare, Carr stirs Greek mythology, Gothic romance and biblical imagery into the play’s bubbling and occasionally overflowing cauldron. Woman, who has spent years knitting in the absence of her roving husband, resembles Odysseus’ weaving wife Penelope. The thing in the wardrobe seems part angel of death, part Fury, part malevolent, churchyard crow; Scarecrow is at once an alter ego, a familiar who keeps the crow creature at bay, and — in a final, delicious twist — something far less reassuring. The mundane also meets the sinister in the coldly solicitous, black-clad Auntie Ah and Woman’s resentful, guilt-ridden husband, while scores of unseen relatives and a Catholic priest — another crow? — wait next door with growing impatience for her to gasp her last.

Carr’s play is partly a black comedy charting a passionate life stifled in a provincial Ireland ruled by moral, domestic and religious hypocrisy. But it also raises vast existential and tragic themes about the lives we choose to lead and the legacy we leave behind, as well as the power of fate and our ability to fight it. Shaw, pale and bony as Woman, is magnificent: vain, witty, despairing and desolate, howling with grief at the

loss of her children yet worn out by bearing them, filled with rage for her husband but still deeply in love with him. She’s surrounded by superb support — Brid Brennan’s coolly compassionate, teasing Scarecrow, Stella McCusker as Auntie Ah — whose very name sounds like the exhalation of generations of pain — and Peter Gowen as the husband. An extraordinary brew, bittersweet and totally intoxicating.

Box office: 020-7565 5000