Mrs Klein

Whichever way you look at it, parenthood is a life or death responsibility; if your viewpoint is a psychoanalytic one the burden is heavier still, because you have to ensure your child's psychic health as well. Given their beliefs, it's a wonder analysts ever have children (full disclosure: I'm a psychoanalyst's daughter). Melanie Klein wrote on the rage and ensuing guilt of the thwarted infant in relation to the mother; of reconciling 'good' and 'bad' breasts ñ mother-love and hatred ñ and the difficulties involved. She understood the gap between the mother, who must love and cherish, and the analyst, who must remain detached. But, being human, she ignored the gap and made patients of her children anyway.

Nicholas Wright's 1988 play analyses the fallout: it's 1934, Hans has just died and Melitta ñ who has become a professional rival ñ is neurotic, unhappy and furious. But Wright knows that while analysis takes place in a kind of bubble, it is absolutely connected to the rest of the protagonists' lives; and so he introduces Paula, another Jewish ÈmigrÈe analyst and as needy in her own way as Melitta, who serves as a stoic reminder that this comfortable Hampstead house (the set is beautiful, and appropriately womb-red) stands in relation to Nazi Berlin much as the analysand's couch does to the rest of his or her life.

The psychobabble can jar, but that's the discipline's failing, not Wright's: his use of language is thrillingly precise (twice, the word 'home-like' is used; heimlich in German means secret, while Das Unheimliche is that Freudian favourite, the uncanny). And the trio of actresses, astutely directed by Thea Sharrock, soon focus our attention on the real drama, which is as old as Oedipus and as oblique as the Sphinx: who Mummy loves best, and why.