Director David Thacker’s setting, as realised in Ciaran Bagnall’s design, highlights a core theme of Arthur Miller’s 1993 play: the mystery of who any of us is, and how we get to be the way we are. Frosted glass panes, sharply angled, define an alcove at the back of the thrust stage. On a bed in the alcove lies a woman, seemingly asleep (who will remain there throughout the action). In this stark setting she appears heart-touchingly vulnerable. Who is she? Why is she there? The first question is never resolved. The second is answered in the opening moments.
Two strangers, meeting in an ante-room, discuss the wives they have come to visit in this state psychiatric clinic. Comparing symptoms and possible causes of each woman’s depression, David Ricardo-Pearce as Leroy and Patrick Poletti as Frick warily shuffle states of edginess, assertiveness and defensiveness. Scene two shifts to Patricia’s room (shared with Olivia Needham’s ever-silent, sleeping woman). Here, Patricia and Karen discuss their husbands (Leroy and Frick respectively), their own mental states and the nature of their situations. Juliet Aubrey’s nervous, restless Patricia sparks Annie Tyson’s almost-inert Karen into flickering reactions and a sublime moment of near self-realisation.
Both conversations reveal tensions between lives led and dreams clung to (with individual experiences coming to symbolise, in classic Miller-style, wider American realities). Closing encounters between husbands and wives offer no simple resolutions, but a messy, human patching of hope and a fissuring of despair. A masterfully executed, haunting chamber piece.
• The Last Yankee is at the Library theatre, Bolton, until 16 March
