Like a thunderbolt out of a clear summer sky, Enid Bagnold’s play is wonderfully startling.

Bagnold, who is best known for her horsey novel, National Velvet, struggled initially to find favour in London for this off-kilter drama, which had its premiere in New York in 1955. Now, for the first time in three decades, it receives a major, well-deserved revival in Michael Grandage’s wicked production.

The setting, a shabbily genteel conservatory in a Sussex manor, might appear to promise a dated and desiccated comedy of manners, but the play drips with juice and is stuffed with plum parts for the mouthwatering cast. Margaret Tyzack, whose command of stage space and tart way with a bon mot are awe-inspiring, is Mrs St Maugham, the self-dramatising eccentric elderly lady of the house, which looks out over a recalcitrant garden cursed with ungenerous chalky soil. Her 16-year-old granddaughter Laurel (Felicity Jones), who has pyromaniac tendencies and a penchant for mendacity, lives with her under the exasperated but affectionate eye of the manservant Maitland (Jamie Glover), whose nerves were shattered by a prison term he served for conscientious objection. They are controlled by the will of Pinkbell, the unseen former family butler, slowly expiring in an upstairs bedroom but still issuing household edicts that are generations out of date.

Into this skewed menage comes Penelope Wilton’s tightly wound Miss Madrigal, in response to Mrs St Maugham’s advertisement for a lady companion for Laurel. Evasive with people, she is tender with plants and begins to coax growth from the garden. But her apparent imperviousness hides a secret as dark and deep-buried as roots in the earth.

Bagnold’s writing is extravagantly eloquent and irresistibly vivid. Describing her mother, whom she hates for remarrying after her father’s death and for her emotional reticence, Jones’s blazing-eyed Laurel says she’s “so overloaded with sex that it sparkles. She’s golden and striped, like something in the jungle.” The words ooze burgeoning feminine sensuality. And the horticultural metaphor – the unyielding soil of the garden representing dysfunctional, loveless family life – is employed with irreproachable deftness.

The play could hardly be better served than it is by these actors.

Wilton’s Miss Madrigal is a masterpiece of economy. Her face drawn, her eyes filled with pain and intelligence, her every movement imbued with the taut hesitancy of one who is accustomed to living under surveillance. Tyzack is magnificent: bitchy, charming, manipulative and, in the end, despite all pretence, a terrified and lonely old lady.

This is a delicious treat: riotously funny, delicately poignant and as light as petals on the breeze.

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