One does not immediately associate Jean Cocteau with boulevard comedy, but the tight structure and lightness of touch of Les parents terribles underlines how skilful a technician he was, even if the underlying drama has all the inexorable desperation of Greek tragedy. The director/designer Stewart Laing sets out his stall for this Dundee Rep production with a similar duality. The sets are naturalistic yet unmistakably theatrical in that they are revealed by removing the fourth wall, which simply slides up.

Yvonne is discovered in her bathroom in a diabetic coma, self-induced simply because her beloved son Michael has not come home from the night before. Her husband, George, and her sister, Leo, sort her out, but when Mickey does turn up with tales of the young woman he has fallen in love with, she is inconsolable. Quite apart from the threat to the suffocating closeness of the mother and her 22-year-old son, the twist is that the lovely Madeleine, the object of his affections, is also the mistress of his father, though she does not know that they are father and son. The action moves to Madeleine's whitewashed studio, perfectly realised by Laing in the top half of the stage, now revealed directly above the first set. There's even the outline of a mansarded roof to complete the evocation of the Parisian atelier. The relatives arrive, until Madeleine is confronted by George. The dénouement leaves no one happy, but Laing cleverly balances the agony and the irony all the way, leaving us, just as Cocteau intended, deliciously uncertain to the end.

Kevin Lennon as Michael (pictured below left, with Emily Winter and Anne Louise Ross) has not the god-like beauty of Jean Marais, for whom Cocteau wrote the play, but his ordinariness, complete with the sort of hat popularised by Pete Doherty, that other man-child, grounds the piece all the more effectively. The five permanent members of the Dundee Rep company all give performances as good as any I can remember. At this rate, the theatre will dominate next year's Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland, just as it did this year's at the weekend.

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010