A Chilean Oedipus

You cannot miss the disturbing, erotic frisson when Francesca Annis, with the airs and enigmatic graces of a Harold Pinter femme fatale, arrives at the apartment of Luca, a temperamental medical student she has recently met. Having barely exchanged a few, correct pleasantries, Miss Annis's Rosa, a married, Chilean war correspondent living in Paris, is half-undressed and in the arms and bed of a man scarcely more than half her age - and young enough to be her son. Fearful dramatic ironies are at hand. For by this point the audience knows far more about the intimate links between Rosa, her psychoanalyst husband Eric and Luca than these three characters do themselves.

Blood, by the prolific Swedish dramatist Lars Noren, is flawed by suspect psychology and flights of deathly melodrama that ridiculously require us to believe that a therapist would not see what is staring him in his consulting room. Yet despite the play's defects, an over-emphasised debt to Oedipus Rex and its farcical heir, Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr Sloane, I was absolutely mesmerised by Blood until the implausible finale. Taboos are freshly broken on the English stage and scenes of incestuous contact between generations - first gay then briefly heterosexual, carry a distressing, emotional charge and uneasy conviction. It would, though, be unfair to give more of Blood's shocking family secrets away.

Noren's play looks back to the 1970s, revealing how the Chilean military Junta have ruined a Jewish, middle-class Left-wing couple, whom they tortured and imprisoned. Their young son also disappeared, never to be seen again. Twenty years on, prosperous in Paris, Rosa and Eric are still possessed by their sense of loss. At first, Blood moves at too leisurely a pace. Miss Annis's Rosa, handsomely aloof, gives an over-lengthy television interview about her autobiographical book on surviving Pinochet. Nicholas Le Prevost as her desiccated, introverted husband watches at home, understandably not that interested.

The mood swiftly changes. In a scene of muted alienation, the gulf between the analyst and his neglected wife looms apparent. Eric's secret love affair with Luca and Rosa's masochistic rituals in which Eric is complicit are chillingly evoked by director James MacDonald in cinematic flashes of light and black-out. Superlative Tom Hardy invests Luca with raw energy and suppressed desperation while Miss Annis is quite wonderful as Rosa, whose tense, watchful composure yields to mute, wide-eyed horror. MacDonald's understated production, although hampered by clumsy scene changes, makes Blood rush with its family hometruths and political animus.

Blood