Ella has devoted her life to bringing up her son, alone. Now he is grown up and has become a piano tuner. Musical talent runs in the family: Ella's dad was once a viola player in a minor orchestra, and her mum sacrificed her talent to bring up her daughters. Now, in middle age, Ella has written a concerto that she wants to see performed. So she and Liz, a successful concert pianist, invite wealthy Beth to the house in the hope that she will help Ella's work see the light of day.
Soon it becomes apparent, through the conversations between these three women, that they have shared experiences - but not always the same memories. They each remember their father, but in quite different ways. Ella's memories of a loving, benign parent are contradicted by the memories of uptight Beth and bitter, spiky Liz. It turns out there is something rather nasty in the woodshed.
Written by Helen Cooper, Three Women and a Piano Tuner plays theatrical games with what initially appears to be a traditional reunited-sisters drama to muse about art, life, memory and the choices we all make that define our lives. At one point, Ella says of her concerto: "Kindred spirits will pick it up; non-kindreds will walk past." Alas, although I have enjoyed Cooper's work previously, particularly in its excavation of the rich emotional hinterlands of women's lives, I am not a kindred spirit when it comes to this play.
It has, in Samuel West's production, a wonderful grace and it is impeccably acted, but it is also contrived in the trickery of its central premise - so much so that it sacrifices emotional truth for a mere conceit that is clever in a technical way but obstructs the drama. As a result, a play that should be devastating ends up merely seeming precious.
· Until July 3. Box office: 01243 781312.
