There’s a shocking, sophisticated savagery in Edward Albee’s 1991 drama, all the more appalling for the fact that it is directed by a woman at herself — or, more accurately, her selves. For the three tall women are one and the same: the bright, beautiful 26-year-old, named only as C, is fated to become B, middle-aged, resigned, filled with barely contained bile, and finally, at 92, A, crusty, cantankerous and cruel, and aching for death’s final release.

Yet the play begins in deceptively realist style. In an elegant pastel-toned bedroom, A, attended by her carer (B) is visited by C, come from A’s solicitor’s office to set her affairs in order. Here are the familiar terrors of infirm old age: pain, incontinence, grief for lost looks and lost youth, dependence on others and the resentment that it engenders. In Act II, though, the style becomes expressionist. A has suffered a stroke. Her comatose body in the bed is replaced by a dummy, while she and her younger personae bicker, compete, offer conflicting accounts of her life and contemplate its end, with a combined bleakness and black vaudevillian humour that is powerfully reminiscent of Beckett.

The piece was inspired by Albee’s troubled relationship with his adoptive mother, and both A and B speak with alternate wheedling longing and venom of their homosexual son, “that thing” who never loved them and who cared only for “his boys”. It’s horrifying, and Irina Brown’s economical production gives it, and all the emotional and tonal shifts in Albee’s complex text, plenty of space to resonate.

Brown clearly appreciates the value of stillness, and during the first act, when the dialogue is dominated by A’s reminiscences, she wisely keeps Diane Fletcher’s wry but solicitous B and Anna-Louise Plowman’s sharp, patronising C at the margins, allowing Marjorie Yates’s excellent A to bask in the spotlight. Yates beautifully captures A’s contradictions: she is proud, needy, vicious and vulnerable all at once. Small wonder that, in the second act, when all three actresses take up her story, Plowman’s C shrinks in horror from the reality that this is her destiny.

This is not a flashy production; but its unadorned precision is the perfect accompaniment to Albee’s elegant dance of death.

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