After Mrs Rochester, Lyric Hammersmith, London, ****

Are you tired of the "madwoman in the attic'' feminist schtick? Are you allergic to plays about novelists, and to stage adaptations of novels in which the author figure sits and scribbles while his or her demons emerge from the woodwork and cavort in psychologically meaningful configurations about in the lumber-room of his or her mind? Well, prepare to have your prejudices swept aside.

After Mrs Rochester – written and directed for Shared Experience by Polly Teale – breathes new life into both subject and form. Literary intertextuality, which can be so wearisome on stage, is given a true dramatic dynamism in a piece that takes us inside the mind of the ageing writer, Jean Rhys. It juxtaposes her own life with Jane Eyre and The Wide Sargasso Sea, the novel that she wrote to make belated amends to Bertha Mason, Mr Rochester's incarcerated first wife, by fleshing out her West Indian background and cultural predicament.

The play takes off from the fact that Rhys, who encountered Charlotte Brontë's book as a young woman, had particular cause to identify with Mrs Rochester Mark I. She was reared on the island of Dominica in the impoverished gentility of a mildewed colonial family who were disparaged as "white niggers" by the community. Despatched to school in England, she afterwards proceeded through a succession of jobs (chorus girl, artist's model, mannequin), and of marriages and men (including an affair with Ford Maddox Ford) – though to say that she was a demi-mondaine would be to underestimate the degree of sheer drift in all this. And, like the first Mrs Rochester, she was driven to the point of biting the oppressive male hand that only reluctantly fed her.

Diana Quick gives a beautiful and very moving performance as Jean in her late sixties, living in drink-sodden seclusion in Devon and pondering The Wide Sargasso Sea. Angela Davies' lovely design imagines this habitat as a landscape of the mind, with the Devon house merged indissolubly with the West Indian island, its floor shading off into a shoreline, the suitcases full of papers becoming the rocks on which the wild young Jean frolicked with her black best friend. The teenage Jean is played with piercing, rebellious ardour by Madeleine Potter, who also shows us the young woman who, with her derided background and accent, is a peculiar charismatic mix of defencelessness and detachment. You can see why a man would want to wrap this creature up in a fur, and also why he might want to wrap up a liaison with her rather abruptly.

Woven into the pattern of remembered experience is the fictional figure of Bertha Mason (Sarah Ball), a matted, feral presence first seen slumped in torpor, but increasingly roused to an anguished fury that counterpoints and comments upon Jean's own plight. What is particularly admirable about the psychological kaleidoscope that Teale shakes from this material is the lack of self-pity. You are able to view Jean from the perspective of her mother, an abusive woman who was, we realise, herself a tragic figure, desperately trying to cling to Victorian respectability in a rotting outpost. And, in a fine touch that gives a present-tense freshness to the repeated idea of locked rooms, mental and actual, the play shows us the sixty-something Jean refusing entry to her Devon home to the daughter she was never really there for.

Even at the end, when she is allowed in, this daughter remains marginal to Jean's real life – which is conducted in her head and given a renewed and different kind of life by this excellent show.

To 10 May (0870-050 0511)