DANGEROUS Corner is one of JB Priestley's three 'time' plays, the trio being completed by Time And The Conways and I Have Been Here Before.

These 'time' pieces are an exploration of the split, serial and circular theories of time, in this case offering up a potentially different path forward if one circumstance, one second's course, had changed, much like in Peter Howitt's 1988 film Sliding Doors or Alan Ayckbourn's Intimate Exchanges.

Dangerous Corner equally could be called a timebomb play, in that it takes only one loose word to set in motion explosive consequences. In that regard, it has similarities with the best known of all Priestley's 47 plays, An Inspector Calls, a foundation-crumbling drama it pre-dates by 13 years.

Written in 1932, this thoroughly modern thriller is set in the chic country retreat of the young, beautiful and fashionably rich Robert and Freda Caplan (Rupert Penry-Jones and Anna Wilson-Jones). The world is their egotistical oyster as they dine with their glamorous publishing friends, introverted Olwen Peel (Dervla Kirwan), cynical bachelor Charles Stanton (Patrick Robinson), dance music enthusiast Gordon Whitehouse (Steve John Shepherd), his superficially-innocent wife Betty (Katie Foster-Barnes) and American novelist Maud Mockeridge (Jacqueline Pearce), a writer as dismissive as her surname.

One stray, truthful comment is the 'match in the gunpowder', or maybe the domino effect, as painful revelation knocks over painful revelation about the suicide of Robert's brother Martin the previous year. As the drinks pile up, so do the confessions of infidelity, betrayal and fraud, Priestley exposing them as starkly as a series of spectral X-rays, yet at the same time, in this time time-and-emotion study, he wonders whether the lie, the half truth and anything but the truth might serve better than the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Laurie Sansom's piercing production - bound for the West End - successfully updates the setting to a minimalist 21st century environment, with Jessica Curtis's Feng Shui set putting the town into the country. Penry-Jones excels as the unseeing Robert, and although Kirwan is too prone to sticking her hands in her pockets in her first stage role for seven years, her emotional range and rich-girl English accent are impressive.

After the failed experiment of Johnson Over Jordan, the Playhouse Priestley season has turned the Corner.

Box office: 0113 213 7700.