The staccato menaces of John Browne's score emphasise the post-cataclysmic imagery of The Mistress of Silence at the Everyman Palace. For this Meridian reading of Jacqueline Harpman's bleak novel, Gina Moxley as Child invokes other inhabitants of a bunker-full of female prisoners.
Her own initial dwelling is an elevated cage; when the women release themselves following a nuclear catastrophe she follows and then leads their wanderings through a weatherless and insectless - although not water-less - landscape until they begin to die, horribly, of cancer.
Dramatised by Johnny Hanrahan, who directs with John Browne, The Mistress of Silence hails from the "with one bound she was free" school of literature. But it also has a Beckettian flavour which at times is quite compelling.
The possibility of metaphorical significance is weakened only by its own inconsistencies.
It demands from its audience - seated, incidentally, in extreme discomfort on a stage as inadequately adapted as the novel - a pretty comprehensive suspension of disbelief.
Narrative contradictions do not distract Gina Moxley, however. She acts with concentration and composure and is fully attuned to a role which is given climactic resonance through Lucy Carter's lighting and sound design from John Browne and Cormac O'Connor.