Triangles, as well as circles, are perpetually traced in the elegant lines of Somerset Maugham’s 1921 drama, effectively revived by Jonathan Church. In a plush Dorset manor, suggested in Simon Higlett’s design by frigid white columns and a distant view of a ruthlessly neat topiary garden, not a drop of blood is spilt, but the words exchanged are cutting indeed. Church’s cast could do more to convey their stifled agony and the sexual politics of Maugham’s writing sometimes jar. But the precision of plotting and character remain impressive and, for all its dated and sometimes arch dialogue, the play still speaks eloquently on the tantalising elusiveness of perfect, enduring romantic union.

The rising politician Arnold Champion-Cheney was abandoned, aged 5, by his mother Kitty when she deserted his father for his best friend, Lord Porteous. Now Arnold faces an emotional ordeal: his effervescent young wife, Elizabeth, has invited Kitty and Porteous to a house party at which Arnold’s father, Clive, also unexpectedly turns up. The reunion, though mannerly, bristles with pricking betrayals like the pin cushion upon which Kitty left Clive her curt farewell note. And Elizabeth’s rose-tinted view of Kitty and Porteous’s transgression is a precursor to the swelling passion between her and another guest, Teddy, who has a Malayan rubber farm.

With coolness and some cruelty Maugham maps out the fate that might easily await Elizabeth if she treads the same path as Kitty. Numerous parallels are drawn between the two women, neatly underlined in Church’s production. The girlish flirtations of Charity Wakefield’s Elizabeth are mirrored in those of Susan Hampshire’s blowsy, glittery Kitty; yet in the older woman, Maugham mercilessly indicates, they are sad and ludicrous. She is, as David Yelland as her former husband declares, “a silly worthless woman”, whose “soul is as thickly rouged as her face”. What’s more, she has ruined the career of Philip Voss’s grumpy, boozy Porteous with scandal and left her son Arnold (Richard Lintern) with a hunger for propriety that has led him to regard his trophy wife Elizabeth as part of the antique furniture he keeps arranging.

The attack on Kitty makes uncomfortable listening, verging on the misogynistic, as does the implication that Elizabeth is erotically attracted to Teddy’s avowal that if she should ever play him false he will black her eyes. But, in its evocation of the wounds we inflict on others and ourselves in the pursuit of love, Maugham’s play is achingly enduring.

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