It was inspired by the suicide of the gay playwright's male ex-lover, but Terence Rattigan's searing 1952 drama centres on an enthralling heroine. Hester Collyer is caught between postwar society's strictures and passion, between sordid self-destruction and miserable life, and between her wealthy, successful husband and her feckless, penniless young lover. The daughter of a clergyman, married, not unhappily but without fire or force of feeling, to a member of the judiciary, she is judged on every side, not least by herself, as she sacrifices herself for a love she knows will never be returned.

The repressive English morality and the stiff-lipped code of conduct that Hester defies may have slackened since Rattigan wrote the play. But the transgressive shock of Hester's attempted suicide, the incredulity with which it is met and the flagrant, all-consuming ferocity of her feelings remain shatteringly powerful in this fine revival, directed by Edward Hall and starring an incandescent Greta Scacchi.

Watching Scacchi inhabit the character is an almost uncomfortably intense experience. First we see her, a limp rag doll, unceremoniously carried from the dilapidated room where her effort to gas herself has failed purely because the money in the meter ran out.

With her fallen hero lover, the ex-RAF pilot Freddie Page (Dugald Bruce-Lockhart), she is mingled agony and ecstasy, shuddering with desire under his touch, performing a playful striptease before tossing her silk slip to him, yet gulping down the bitter knowledge that her utter devotion is met only by fondness. She is dignified gentility with her landlady and with her gossiping, rubbernecking neighbours, and aching regret with Simon Williams as her patrician husband. But it's when she's alone, gasping and choking on her sobs and crawling in despair on the floor, that Scacchi reveals the depths of Hester's humiliating, hopeless suffering.

It's a great merit of Hall's production that she is not the only one in pain. Bruce-Lockhart's Page is horrifyingly cruel, flinging Hester's obsession back in her face with sadistic, drunken sarcasm; but he's also self-loathing, appalled by the damage his inability to connect emotionally causes him to inflict and rudderless in a civilian world for which his wartime heroics have not equipped him.

Williams, too, catches the quiet despair and compassion of Collyer; and the dry wit of Tim McMullan's struck-off Middle European doctor, Miller, is obviously a defence against the resurgence of haunting memories that give him an instinctive if tersely expressed sympathy for Hester. The struggle of these unhappy people to make their compromised lives liveable is brutal yet humane, as timelessly recognisable as it is riveting.

At Richmond Theatre (0870 0606651) this week; then Clwyd Theatr, Cymru; Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury

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