Edward Albee's award-winning play Three Tall Women focuses on old age and death and is therefore hardly ideal for those in search of escapist entertainment.

But why escape? Death being a fact of life - indeed, life's only certainty we should surely confront it head-on, as this gripping play does.

And all the better if we can ourselves show some of the grim humour that Albee brings to this brilliantly written case study of a woman swiftly moving towards the grave.

Like life itself, in a way, this is a play of two halves. In the first we meet the unnamed nonagenarian (Marjorie Yates) at its centre. A victim of her years and of illness, her life is now passed between bedroom and bathroom, with the function of one sometimes mistaken for that of the other.

Clearly once a very grand and wealthy woman, she remains haughty and aloof in between bouts of tear-stained melancholy. She viciously puts in their places both her long-suffering paid companion (Diane Fletcher) and the feisty young lawyer (Anna-Louise Plowman) who has dropped in - her presence remains unexplained for 20 minutes - to try to put her tangled financial affairs in order.

While the first stoically smooths things over, the second responds with an off-putting lack of sympathy. She is genuinely outraged, for instance, at what appear to her to be outrageously racist words used by the old lady, forgetting that this vocabulary was once common currency.

Time, then, for a few lessons on the way things were, and the way things are going to be - for all of us. These come after the interval when, with the comatose form of the old lady (actually a dummy) confined to bed, the three performers, in various shades of ghostly pastel pink, take turns to present her at three stages in her life.

No, not 'take turns', for the three inter-react. Indeed, it is these sharp exchanges - between the youthfully confident 26-year-old, her 52-year-old self, and the crippled old lady she will become - that provide the meat of the play.

Many of them concern sex - in fact, there seems to me a little too much about sex for credibility always to be maintained. Others concern money and the fall-out with the gay son (Sam Curtis) who eventually arrives to moon mutely over the death bed.

Not comfortable stuff, as I said - but always beautifully acted and directed, and a credit to producer Tish Francis, who is responsible for this latest 'home-grown' Playhouse production.