“We murder to dissect,” wrote Wordsworth, referring to excessive study killing our appreciation of the wonders of nature. And what, in its way, is psychoanalysis but an intense study of personality that stifles individual quiddities? And how much more stifling might that be when superimposed on a parent/child relationship?

Nicholas Wright’s 1988 play – Thea Sharrock’s scrupulous production at the Almeida is its first big revival – centres on one of the pioneers of child psychiatry, Melanie Klein, whose professional preoccupations have generated a complex rivalry with her daughter (also an analyst and one of Klein’s fiercest critics) and may have led her son to take his own life in 1934. Much of the play’s psychodrama turns on facts and interpretations regarding Hans Klein’s final hours.

Claire Higgins’ brilliance at portraying torrents of emotion is matched by her astuteness in suppressing them. Her Mrs Klein is all about control, both of herself and of others, until those moments when she loses it. Yet these are never the points when she is most overtly goaded by her daughter Melitta (who is revealed to be the Dr Schmideberg about whom Klein has been so vitriolic before her arrival) or more discreetly manipulated by her newly arrived colleague Paula Heimann, who seems to be set on supplanting Melitta as Klein’s “daughter”.

Nicola Walker as Paula grows during the evening from a position of ingenuousness to one of knowledge, analytic adroitness and even a control of her own. Zoë Waites’s Melitta soon abandons her glacially smiling put-downs of Paula and, on Klein’s unexpected return home, gets stuck into tussling with her mother instead, both personally and professionally.

Wright’s play is clever, amusing and poignant, sometimes all at once. However, there seems to be a complacent undercurrent to assumptions about the psychoanalytically literate audience, who can appreciate gags such as Klein using a three-drawer filing cabinet for subjects she classifies as “ego”, “superego” and “id”. Despite the rise in estimates of the number of us who suffer from mental illness at one time or another, it is still often seen as something of a luxury to be able to afford to have such problems.

Tel +44 20 7359 4404
Principal sponsor: Coutts