Les Parents Terribles

But it does offer Frances Barber as the over-protective Yvonne, a decadent middle-class slob who has fits of jealous – if not  incestuous – hysteria when her grown-up son gets a girlfriend. No one does over-the-top grotesques quite like Barber: spitting hoarse venom, she is in her element in a role that might have been written for her.

Equally, no one does acerbic deadpan quite like Sylvestra Le Touzel, a disgracefully under-appreciated actress, as Yvonne’s repressed, calculating sister Léonie. Together they are mesmerising as the rival forces of order and disorder, the one elegant and brisk, the other howling in a self-indulgent agony that weaves teasingly back and forth between comedy and tragedy.

Tom Byam Shaw is an energetic faun as Yvonne’s son love-struck Michael, lapping up his mother’s adoration with narcissistic greed. Strong support also comes from Elaine Cassidy as Michael’s  girlfriend Madeleine and Anthony Calf as his weak-willed father, who turns chillingly nasty when it emerges he has been carrying on with the same girl.

Designed by Andrew D Edwards, the production is lavishly dressed for such a tiny space, and it fizzes along under Rolls’ pacy direction. Cocteau’s wonderfully observed tragic-farce may not shock the way it first did in 1938, but in Jeremy Sams’ translation it still sparkles.

– Simon Edge