Letitia Dean and Michelle Collins have both done it. Now Hannah Waterman, the daughter of Dennis and best known as Laura, the down-trodden, ill-fated wife of the vile Ian Beale in EastEnders, follows in the footsteps of her two fellow former denizens of Albert Square by appearing in Charles Dyer’s 1962 play. It’s not clear what the attraction was for any of them. Dyer’s drama is hopelessly dated, toe-curlingly twee and stultifyingly static. Yet Ian Dickens’s brisk production serves up a real surprise: Waterman, bearing not a trace of her dowdy soap incarnation, rises above the limitations of the material to offer an arrestingly fine performance.

She plays tart-with-a-heart Cyrenne, who takes Percy, a befuddled Northern football fan on a weekend London jolly, back to her place to divest him of his middle-aged virginity. Percy, whose unseen cronies have wagered £50 on his inability to score, is a reluctant client. So instead of intercourse, he and Cyrenne indulge in circuitous conversation that eventually culminates in the baring of souls rather than of bodies.

The writing lurches between sentimentality and melodrama, and Dyer’s prudish avoidance of any candid treatment of sex is irksome, though there are hints, especially when Cyrenne’s brother briefly turns up, of childhood abuse. It’s left largely to Waterman to give the play grit, and she manages it admirably. Her blonde beehive is askew, her throaty voice somewhere between husky erotic promise and rusty razorblades. She switches between hard-faced faux refinement, maternal warmth and lonely despair, and looks almost like a little girl as she spins stories of a genteel upbringing, fantasies with which she temporarily convinces the gullible Percy as well as herself. Desolation lurks behind every emotional shift, and a bitter, self-mocking note resounds through her brittle banter.

Lumbered with the task of playing the irritating Percy, Huw Higginson does a creditable job, tempering the character’s maddening procrastination and implausible naiveté by suggesting, particularly in one clumsy but forceful bedside lunge towards Waterman, a carnal appetite rearing up from beneath his shambling surface. And Andrew Bloomer as Cyrenne’s sibling brings a quality of proprietorial menace, as well as a whiff of incestuous sexual confusion, to his fleeting appearance.

But if the production is worth catching, it’s for Waterman, whose achievement is to turn Dyer’s creaky creation into a flesh-and-blood woman in whom, by the end, you genuinely believe and care about.

Box office: 0870 0332733, to July 5

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