silverguide.site –

Lonely lives, falling between the gaps, are at the heart of this 1935 psychological thriller by Rodney Ackland, adapted from Hugh Walpole’s novel. It’s an atmospheric period piece, but isn’t entirely a stretch to reflect on our own concerns about solitude in an ageing population.

The three ladies in an English cathedral town are without partners, families or much of an income. They eke out their genteel poverty in a rickety boarding house. They weren’t raised to work; Miss Beringer, in desperate need of a job, can only imagine becoming a paid companion or, possibly, flower arranging.

In Brigid Larmour’s finely etched production, irritable passions ferment beneath the frowsty knits and beads. The characters are prey to spite and greed, nerves and night terrors. Voices are tremulous; eyes glance at a fearful future.

Beringer is the new lodger: Catherine Cusack, whittled by anxiety, timidly nibbles on a scallop-edged biscuit. She is welcomed by Julia Watson’s Mrs Amorest, flustered but keeping up appearances. Down to her last £10, she writes into the void to a long-absent son.

The third lady is Agatha. Fruitily overblown in the novel, that’s how Edith Evans played her in 1935 (“a monstrous and poisonous plant, grotesque and bulbous,” according to one review). Abigail Thaw makes her disconcertingly eccentric: forbidding in jet black, she mocks and snaps at quivering Miss Beringer (“Do you know when you’re going to die? Do you want to know?”). She covets Beringer’s one cherished possession – a translucent chunk of amber from a beloved female friend.

It’s a play of cross-hatched conversations and melodramatic plotting. Larmour’s design team help turn the screw: the dank-toned house and clothes in tones of moth and cobweb, a bitter wind blowing (set, costumes and sound by Juliette Demoulin, Carla Joy Evans and Max Pappenheim).

Ackland’s plays about rackety lives are increasingly revived. He, Walpole and John Gielgud, the play’s original director, were all queer artists, and it’s tempting to imagine them drawn to these lives on the margins of British society. Though these ladies don’t so much rage against the dying of the light as wait, fearfully, to be snuffed out.

• At the Finborough theatre, London, until 19 April.