British playwright Deborah Bruce’s domestic drama depicts a fractious Northern English household of women suffering and struggling with the legacy bequeathed to them by their father.

Mary Dixon (Vanessa Downing) has come back to her home, having completed a prison sentence. Still seething with indignation and the conviction that she did nothing wrong, all she wants is her own bed.

Standing in the way is the vanguard of the welcoming committee: her daughters Bernie (Linda Nicholls-Gidley) and Julie (Romney Hamilton), who do their best to accommodate their mother’s brittle mood.

Linda Nicholls-Gidley in Dixon & Daughters. Photo © Campbell Parsons

Everyone is on eggshells and Julie’s presence is a particular problem. An alcoholic recently in the throes of separating from her partner, she’s been camping in her mother’s house for weeks and, worse still, sleeping in Mary’s bed.

Furthermore, Mary has an axe to grind: Julie refused to back up her testimony in court, which Mary believes contributed to her being sent down (at this stage, we don’t know for what).

Even less welcome on the scene is Briana (Sarah Jane Starr), formerly Tina, Mary’s stepdaughter, whose enthusiastic embrace of self-help jargon is her way of dealing with the secrecy that not only hangs over the house but seems to lurk in one empty room in particular.

With the playwright drip-feeding us information, we come to understand why this fractious household is the way it is – and how a father’s unspeakable actions metastasised into a toxic legacy.

Romney Hamilton in Dixon & Daughters. Photo © Campbell Parsons

Delivering spooky atmospheres and crackling with sharp humour (Mary’s concerns over a memory foam mattress are particularly poignant and hilarious), director Kim Hardwick’s production is never less than engrossing.

The cast – which includes Danette Potgieter as a homeless ex-prisoner and Rylea Eilis as Mary’s college-student granddaughter – performs flawlessly on a meticulously shabby, split-level set (designed by Mia MacCormick, lit by Topaz Marlay-Cole) that presents the house in dollhouse cutaway. There’s no privacy, no room to decompress. Everything feels discomfortingly close-up and real.

Bruce’s script creates some potential for melodrama when a backstory of almost gothic awfulness is hauled into view, but everything about this show is perfectly scaled to an intimate room. Nothing feels overplayed or overstated.

Dixon & Daughters plays at the Old Fitzroy Theatre, Woolloomooloo until 3 October.