Repressed lesbian passion, a sadistic schoolchild with a talent for mendacity, and the hormonal hothouse of an institution full of pubescent females: Lillian Hellman's drama, first performed in 1934, might not shock today as it did then, but it's still a bubbling, spicy, melodramatic stew.

Sarah Frankcom's Manchester revival is measured, which, while it tempers the play's potential to become camply overblown, also makes it a touch ponderous. It is most compelling when the action is dominated by Kate O'Flynn's Mary: the troublemaker who, by cooking up a scandal around allegations of “unnatural” affections between two female teachers, provokes destruction on a scale even she hasn't anticipated.

O'Flynn is chilling from our first glimpse of her. She strides into Liz Ascroft's set, a revolving map of the world, wearing a cool, appraising and breathtakingly arrogant expression that bespeaks a lust to become queen of all she surveys. Scaring her fellow pupils into collaboration with blackmail and bullying she is giddy with power; escaping school by reducing her teachers to puppets twitching at the end of a string of lies is a temptation too alluring to resist.

O'Flynn is creepily astute, dishing out cruelty with a dash of unpleasant intimacy; one tremulous victim finds herself subjected first to threats, then to a swift, toxic kiss. In the claustrophobic, intensely feminine environment of the school, where crushes are nurtured and racy fiction covertly passed around, it is a heady and deadly combination.

The play offers little real psychological insight into this junior sociopath, but she is much more fun to watch than the two beleaguered teachers, well played though they are. Maxine Peake's gravely intelligent Karen and Charlotte Emmerson's gawky, anaemic, febrile Martha have, in setting up the school, attempted to build a life for themselves and succeeded only in constructing their own prison.

Time and again in Frankcom's production, watchful, whispering girls ring the stage, eavesdropping on the action. Peake moves convincingly from incredulity to rage and despair, while Emmerson makes you feel the frightened bewilderment of a woman who comes to know herself only through another's malicious lie. But their exchanges often lack potency and pace, and they never sufficiently suggest the suffocating closeness of their friendship, which began when they themselves were little older than their students.

But if Hellman's writing and Frankcom's restraint are something of a mismatch, O'Flynn's Mary, with her swagger, her poisonous egocentrism and her flagrantly contemptuous gaze, makes this staging worth catching; she's a spectacularly nasty piece of work.

Box office: 0161-833 9833

Editor's choice

• Alicia Keys lets rip
• Streep and Baldwin get complicated
• Guy Ritchie on Sherlock Holmes