The versatility and fearlessness of playwright Helen Edmundson is evident in a CV that includes adaptations of War and Peace (and Anna Karenina for good measure) and a recent play for the Royal Shakespeare Company, The Heresy of Love, telling the story of writer/nun Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz.

It is to another woman writer that she has turned to create yet more compelling theatre in her new play Mary Shelley. This is not so much a study of creative power — though we do hear of the composition of Mary’s first and most famous book, Frankenstein. Instead, it is a hugely entertaining depiction of the four women in the household of the political thinker William Godwin — expertly portrayed by William Chubb — and the consequences for a number of them of the irruption into their lives of the young poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.

The Playhouse first night performance of the play on Tuesday of last week had to be abandoned at the interval when Flora Nicholson, playing Fanny Godwin, was overcome with heat exhaustion. (Odd to think what has happened to the weather since!) At Saturday’s matinée, which I attended, it looked as if she might be forced to withdraw again after taking a heavy fall minutes into the play. Happily, she was able to continue after a short interruption.

An enterprise such as this depends for its success to a significant degree on securing an actor of sufficient charisma to show us the whirling bundle of creative energy that was Shelley. In Ben Lamb director Polly Teale has found the perfect man.

It required no straining of credulity whatever to watch him bowling over the young Mary (Kristin Atherton) and, indeed, her younger stepsister Jane (Shannon Tarbet), who was later to end in the arms of the notorious Lord Byron for whom she bore a daughter.

The latter’s complicity in Mary’s romance and later scandalous elopement is one of the most touching elements of the play. Not the least of its fine features was the contribution of Sadie Shimmin as Mrs Godwin, the woman charged with trying to bring some semblance of order into three young lives.