British critics are usually snooty about Australian plays. But Joanna Murray-Smith's Honour deserves to overcome our cultural snobbery because it is so wrenchingly honest about sex and marriage and because Roger Michell's Cottesloe production is superlatively acted.
At first we seem to be in familiar terrain, both emotionally and geographically, since this story of a fractured marriage has been shifted from Oz to England. George, distinguished literary journalist, is being interviewed in depth by bright-eyed, ambitious 28-year-old Claudia; an experience so disruptive that he walks out on his long-standing wife, Honor, and their daughter Sophie, a student. The stuff, you might say, of countless domestic dramas.
But Murray-Smith brings fresh life to an old story by dealing, in minute detail, with the shifting power balance in the central relationships. In a key exchange, Claudia accuses Honor of selling herself and women short by subordinating her career to George's.
Honor retorts that a durable marriage is based on a "necessary loyalty" and the memory of physical passion. Initially one is tempted to side with Claudia and see Honor as a willing victim of George's ego. But Murray-Smith subtly alters the perspective and leaves one asking whether ultimate power lies with the merciless intruder or the mature wife.
My one cavil is that the English social detail doesn't always ring true: when Honor says her daughter means "more than the top 10 in the TLS" you wonder if anyone has lately read that sedate journal and even the idea that a book launch is a key public event stems from Australian, rather than British, literary life.
But the strength of the play lies in its emotional specifics, beautifully realised on William Dudley's elegantly sparse traverse stage.
But it is the acting which takes one's breath away. Eileen Atkins brilliantly registers the convulsive shock of seeing 32 years of marriage abruptly terminated. She looks like a woman whose soul has been stripped bare. Yet she also conveys the resilience and irony of a woman forced by crisis into a redefinition of self.
Corin Redgrave matches her perfectly, as a husband who sheds his marriage and who is reduced to blank-eyed desolation by the delusion of new-found love. Catherine McCormack's negligent sensuality as the careerist Claudia is also cleverly offset by Anna Maxwell Martin's baffled betrayal as the angry daughter.
I wouldn't say the acting flatters the writing; what it does do is heighten Murray-Smith's devastating alertness to the intricate politics of marital crack-up, in which memory is the key weapon.
· In rep until May 13. Box office: 020-7452 3000.
