Sea of heartbreak

This is a revelation, a rare feat of theatrical imagining in which playwright Polly Teale illuminates the disturbed interior world of that remarkable 20th century novelist Jean Rhys.

After Mrs Rochester inevitably lacks the scope and analytic rigour of a full-scale literary biography but it achieves something harder and more rewarding. Miss Teale's play makes it feel as if you have actually experienced life through the unquiet mind and sensibility of Rhys. And Teale, who herself directs a magnificently organised, expressionistic production, persuasively suggests Rhys's novels resembled desperate attempts at selftherapy, struggles to appease the rages, fears and despair that dogged her life.

The stage, on which Diana Quick's absolutely mesmerising, white-haired Rhys appears wearing an expression of bewildered, dwindled fury, is a fragmented ruin. There is a door and stumps of wood suggest a room, beyond which lies a changeable sky. The possessions of a transient - cases and trunks - are scattered around.

From a vast closet, skeletons make exits and entrances. But when Rhys's estranged daughter comes knocking, she is not admitted. For Rhys is alcoholically well away. She prowls through the painful wreckage of her life, awakening old memories and her younger selves whom Madeleine Potter wonderfully plays in a variety of emotional states, passions and poses.

Scenes from the young Jean's childhood and adolescence in the West Indies with her Creole mother and as a chorus-girl in London, where she suffers a spate of sexual predators such as Ford Madox Ford (Simon Thorp), flow weirdly into each other with all the unnatural smoothness of a dream. A wild-haired woman, talking in tormented spasms, keeps close to the older Rhys.

She is the first Mrs Rochester, the mad Creole wife from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, whose character Rhys borrowed for her masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea. It is this character, brought to lurid, anguished life by Sarah Hall, who serves as Rhys's alter ego, becoming her shadow, vehemently expressing anger and fury that the withdrawn novelist could not.

Only through writing her confessional novels does Rhys exorcise Mrs Rochester's influence, but the dreamscape revelations show Rhys is left as a ruined husk. Quick's beautiful, bewildered novelist, haunted by desertions and depressions, cocooned in solitariness, gazes into the murky depths of a past that Miss Teale enthrallingly anatomises. A knock-out.

After Mrs Rochester