But in this 90-minute play she essays American Gothic and the result, while fitfully entertaining, is also rather wilfully eccentric. All four characters are oddballs and it's a case of too many kooks spoiling the broth.

The tone is blackly comic. A character called Sister returns to the family home. Her brother Carl and his wife Betty aim to swindle Sister of her inheritance, buy a giant furniture store and live out the American Dream. But with the arrival of Paul, bisexual owner of the land Carl seeks to buy, we get a poisonous four-way power-battle with victory going to the strongest; or possibly the strangest.

The problem is the only character she attempts to see from the inside is the weird Sister who, because she is a victimised virgin who entertains fancies of flight, is automatically viewed as heroic. But even if the writing is strenuously whimsical, Jo Davies's production captures very well a mood of heightened, non-naturalistic oddity aided by Tim Meacock's design in which an aquarium doubles as the kitchen sink. Michelle Abrahams as the would-be airborne Sister, Paul Stewart as her morally defective brother, Sadie Shimmin as his pneumatic wife and Steven O'Shea as the visitor whose tongue is in rather more than his cheek also perform with an animated energy that compensates for Henley's hectic capriciousness.