Five kinds of silence, The Old Red Lion Theatre, London

Life after death

An apparent climax begins Five Kinds of Silence . Two grown-up sisters take it in turns to shoot, at point-blank range, the father who has sexually abused them since their early teens and turned their home into a stifling prison. Crude, exploitative plays on this much-mistreated topic tend to work up to an all-too-predictable disclosure, flourishing the revelation of abuse as the final piece of the jigsaw that, slotted in, now supposedly clarifies everything.

Shelagh Stephenson's drama is a salutary and humane rebuke to such easy sensationalism, cunningly structured to show that there are no cathartic endings in cases like this. In the minds of his daughters and their downtrodden mother, the tyrannical patriarch, Billy, lives on – a fact creepily embodied by giving him a watchful posthumous stage-presence. This prowling figure, in a respectable tweed suit, can still terrorise with his emotional blackmail.

Five Kinds of Silence was originally a radio drama, as is sometimes evident from its rather static nature and tricky shifts between interior monologue and conversation. It was first staged a few years ago at the Lyric, Hammersmith. Sonia Fraser's sensitive and powerfully acted revival benefits from the much more claustrophobic atmosphere that it's possible to generate in the studio space in the Old Red Lion. It also boasts some new interpretative touches. David Farrington's dapper, threatening Billy is here presented in an eerie double act with his younger self (Elliot Smith). They share the soliloquies that reveal, somewhat too neatly, his compensation for his own brutalised childhood by turning into a control freak with a siege mentality and a militaristic craving for order. Billy continues to stalk the dreams of his family, but this doubling device demonstrates that he always haunted himself.

The idea that man hands on misery to man and that most abusers were themselves abused is scarcely unfamiliar, while the contention that society is complicit in these crimes by turning a blind eye (the fifth kind of silence) seems here to need the support of a sixth kind of silence (next to no information about the surrounding neighbourhood). Where the play scores is in its perceptive treatment of the women's ambivalent response to the world from which they have been cut off for so long. Helen Kirkpatrick and Carolyn Tomkinson are excellent as the daughters: touchingly arrested. painfully polite and dressed in the old-fashioned style of their mother (a deeply affecting Judy Norman). But if they experience their remand cells as a liberation, the language of anger and blame to which the professional experts introduce them feels to them like an imposition. "This getting angry. This feeling this and feeling that. It's not for us. It's not really our sort of thing," one of them tells a psychiatrist, as though resisting some new-fangled gadget.

These sequences are all the more heartbreaking for sometimes being gently comic. Buying Shredded Wheat for the first time is huge treat. The taste, though, is a disappointment. Still, chin up, one says. "I expect we'll get used to it." Little touches like that deftly illustrate their father's continuing influence. His hold is at its most pernicious on the older sister who dreams, with self-disgusted nostalgia, of having sex with Billy. We see there the full extent of his crime – to have so deprived the girl of other forms of intimacy that she mortifyingly pines for the act of incest.

An eloquent play, too emotionally mature for melodrama, that I warmly recommend.

To 14 Sept (020-7837 7816)