Gina McKee is terrific at “fiddly” acting: those tiny movements that are quite inconsequential, but go to build up a detailed picture of natural behaviour. She polishes the screen of her phone, or picks at a toe through her thick sock, or gathers up a batch of magazines which she has allowed to slide off a breakfast tray. (I don’t even know whether this move was planned or an entirely organic cover.) It all goes to make her character, 47-year-old Anne, more believable in her depression following her grown-up children’s departure from home. Paradoxically, she is believable even when we see the same scenes replayed in radically differing versions and have no idea what to believe.

Florian Zeller’s play is, broadly speaking, a companion piece to The Father, about to return to the West End. (Indeed, The Mother opened a few hours after Kenneth Cranham won the Critics’ Circle Award for best actor for The Father.) In each, shifts of reality and perspective interrogate the protagonist’s state of mind. In The Father, the cause is Alzheimer’s, in The Mother Anne’s Freudian jealousy regarding her son and the girlfriend whom she perceives as robbing her of him, and also a pathological (and as far as we can tell, justified) mistrust of her husband’s fidelity.

I choose to interpret the repetition of scenes as presenting matters to us from the point of view of different participants. Thus, Anne in her own view is quiet and reasonable, except when she is forensically interrogating husband Peter (Richard Clothier), whilst in the perception of girlfriend Elodie she speaks in a low, menacing rumble, the classic wicked stepmother only without the "step-". It is possible to find some misogyny in the play, but only by ignoring the counterbalancing misandry: no one here gets off lightly.

Like The Father, this play is translated from the French with sensitivity and cleverness by Christopher Hampton; also like that other play, it comes into London from the Ustinov studio in Bath already garlanded with acclaim. (The difference is that this production is helmed by the Ustinov’s artistic director Laurence Boswell.) Zeller’s The Truth opens off-West End in March; the snowballing sense that he constitutes a significant theatrical discovery is palpable.

Written for the Financial Times.