Good Canary review – the real star is John Malkovich's direction

The Rose at Kingston has suddenly bloomed. John Malkovich’s production of Good Canary makes much of London theatre look slow-witted and slow-eyed. This is the first time Zach Helm’s play, which he finished in 2004, has been performed in English. Malkovich took an early interest in it but – mysteriously – claimed it would be better staged in French. So it was, in Paris. Then it played in Mexico. It is hard to believe that it was much more effective there than here.

There is a secret at the centre of Helm’s plot which subtly shades the events. But you don’t need to know it to feel the vitality – sad and biting – of the action. It begins conventionally, as a picture of a talented, troubled, loving young couple. A bartender’s first novel is being published to great acclaim. His wife descants on his success. She is thought by publishers and critics to be a liability. High on amphetamines and her own words, she spends days in ferocious cleaning; it comes on her to-do list between “get up”, “take speed” and “vomit”. Unleashed on a literary cocktail party – where a publisher all too persuasively dances around his non-reading of the book – she glugs a bottle of vodka, tells the hostess she wears too much makeup, and quite brilliantly eviscerates a critic who has praised her husband’s book.

She is a nightmare and she is in the right. Her speech about male pronouncements on women’s novels is not merely splenetic but accurate. Freya Mavor’s dervish performance – gangling, cartwheeling (literally), poignant and droll – would be worth the trip alone. She is balanced very finely by Harry Lloyd in the less spectacular role of the husband who, unusually, suggests unswerving love with a mild manner. Ilan Goodman is also outstanding as a twitching, squeaky-voiced dealer.

But the real star is Malkovich’s direction. Helm does not explain his heroine, but the production takes you into her. Her addiction is her radiance. Pierre-François Limbosch’s design is a wonderful conjuring of New York – an artistic apartment captured in a slab of turquoise with a rust-coloured border, a glitzy one showing off its showoff owners with wall-to-ceiling plate glass. But it is also a state of mind. A street of brownstones takes on fluorescent intensity. Windows shrink and expand; pills torrent from the sky; super-bright oranges and lime greens give way to blackness and a scarlet inferno.

Women’s addiction used to be – on stage, that is – to men. The females in The Seagull and A Doll’s House were imprisoned by their lovers. Now they are killing and imprisoning themselves on their own. Denise Gough in People, Places and Things; now this. By the way, men don’t have to feel they are excluded from the curse, any more than women should while watching Hamlet.

• At the Rose theatre, Kingston until 8 October