THE CLEAN HOUSE

New Theatre, June 8. Until July 8

★★★

If you are not a Portuguese speaker, chances are the elaborate joke delivered by a young Brazilian woman near the top of Sarah Ruhl's sagacious, broad-spectrum comedy will go over your head. Happily, actor Keila Terencio's animated telling made it pretty clear where the punchline is aimed. Brazilians, it seems, like their humour earthy.

Terencio plays Matilde, an immigrant maid working in the well-appointed American home of Lane, a doctor. But as domestic arrangements go, it's far from perfect. Matilde spends more time dreaming up the perfect joke than attending to chores, which exasperates Lane (Mary-Anne Halpin). The doctor has a powerful need for cleanliness and order. Her marriage, after all, is a mess.

Charles (James Bean), Lane's surgeon husband, has fallen for one of his patients, the exotic and somewhat older Ana (Colleen Cook), and he is prepared to go to the ends of the earth – or at least to the wilds of Alaska – to be with her.

Mischievously funny and whimsical (in a good way), The Clean House is an exceptionally wise and well-crafted comedy. That it hasn't been picked up by a mainstage company in Sydney before now seems remarkable, given it's as good a piece of writing as Ruhl's In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play. Does its focus on women in their 60s make it not "sexy" enough?

All credit to the New Theatre, then, which deserves to reap some box office reward from this handsome production directed by Rosanne McNamara. The design is strong (a sleek domestic setting by David Marshall-Martin) and the acting solid, led by Halpin, who is suitably crisp-yet-brittle, and Bean as the love-stricken Charles.

Terencio, a natural clown if a somewhat raw actor, offers a contrastingly vivid presence as Matilde but McNamara allows her too much comic latitude. In her character's notes, Ruhl describes the maid as having "a refined sense of deadpan". We need to see more of it here.

More reliably funny is Alice Livingstone as Virginia, Lane's sad-sack sister, who has elevated a cleaning compulsion to the level of philosophy. "If you do not clean," she says in one of Ruhl's fourth wall-piercing asides, "how do you know if you've made any progress in life?"

Elsewhere, issues of rhythm, pace, consistency and confidence need to be addressed. But even at this point in the production's development, you would have to be a peculiarly resistant person not to be swayed by Ruhl's inventiveness and empathy for her characters.