In the year that marks the 40th anniversary of the legalisation on homosexuality, this West End revival of Philip Ridley’s two-hander is particularly timely. First seen at the Hampstead Theatre seven years ago, Ridley’s play, with an appallingly sadistic killing at its heart, has a stark simplicity that belies the intricacy of its language and imagery.

A stream of reminiscence that flows between a mother and a young man connected by the violent, tragic death of the woman’s son, in one sense it suggests the succour derived from the sharing of stories. Yet it also conveys powerfully the way in which fiercely held fictions within families, while they remain unchallenged, prop up the familial construct at the cost of dangerously defining and restricting the individuals within it and their relationships.

The plot twists in Ridley’s play are predictable, and its pared-down structure lacks dramatic interest. But the dark subtleties eddying beneath its surface tug fiercely at the emotions and the imagination – especially in a production by Rebecca McCutcheon that is blazingly acted by Mark Field and Lynda Bellingham.

Anita’s son, Vincent, was found savagely murdered in an East End lavatory; Davey found the body. The exchanges they share, in which agony and comfort are cruelly twinned, bring both the mother – who had denied her son’s homosexuality – and the boy – with whom Vincent had a secret link – a kind of redemption. Their relationship shifts from the suspicion of two strangers confronting one another over an atrocity to a mother-son protectiveness, with Davey as Anita’s surrogate child, and even to an explosion of confused Oedipal passion.

Ridley scatters poetic fragments throughout, like a trail of bread-crumbs leading to the supposed safety of home. The lightness of the snow that fell as Vincent died echoes the feathers that Anita once sewed into his angel wings for the school Nativity play. Icy shards recall the glass pressed by his attackers into his eyes. A bloody handprint on the wall of the lavatory is a splinter of an identity, the fraction we allow ourselves to know of a person if we refuse to see what we don’t want to.

Bellingham is shattering as Anita, a tough woman crumbling, her past scarred by the shame of unplanned pregnancy and her present torn by the tragedy of the child ripped away from her. She retains a grimly wise-cracking humour and a husky sexiness that make her eventual, howling release of pain almost shockingly affecting. And Field as Davey is a poignant boy-man, stumblingly unsure whether to give comfort or to seek it, and torn between a kind of hatred for the woman who will force truths from him and his burning compulsion to unburden himself to her.

Ridley may not have created the most satisfying piece of theatre, but he does offer a crucible in which everyday secrets smoulder and where Bellingham and Field are incendiary.

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