Love — of a kind rarely glorified — suffuses this quiet 1977 drama by Hugh Whitemore. It’s an oddball play about an oddball artist of plainspoken brilliance. Here, too, are death and pain, but also joy, mischief, perversity and laughter. All the stuff, in fact, of ordinary life, made extraordinary by the penetrating, cock-eyed clarity with which the Palmers Green poet Stevie Smith condensed it into pungent words.

Merging dialogue, reminiscence and extracts from Smith’s work, Whitemore permits us a peak behind the net curtains of a suburban neighbourhood and into the home that Smith shared with her adored “Lion Aunt”, the steadfast Hull relative with ferocious convictions and a splendid mane of grey hair.

Christopher Morahan’s production savours every detail. And as Stevie, Zoë Wanamakeris stunning, giving a performance that aches and twinkles, by turns teasing and raw.

Simon Higlett’s design, with its worn carpets, faded silk tassels, antimacassars and clutter of ornaments, eloquently suggests decades of shabbily cosy comfort and the tenderness between Wanamaker and Lynda Baron as her leonine aunt emits its own warm glow.

In her pinafore and schoolgirl shoes, bright-eyed, flat-footed and bow-backed, Wanamaker appears at once ageing and childish. When she perches pixie-like on a stool, her legs twisted beneath her, while at her side in an armchair Baron strings beans for their supper, it’s a touchingly lovely image of devotion and domestic ease. Yet in Smith’s sharp, fanciful, funny poetry and in her aridly witty biographical narrative lurk hurt, rage and deep melancholy: the death of her mother, her absent father, her tuberculosis, her preoccupation with mortality.

In less deft hands, the play could seem inconsequential, but like Smith’s writing, the gentle force of this production and Wanamaker’s compelling portrayal burnish the mundane until it becomes a gleaming small marvel.

How many times have you seen a production of a bio-play about an author where the leading actor has managed to persuade you of virtually everything but the crucial fact that he or she could have written the works?

It would be an understatement to say that this is not a problem with Zoe Wanamaker’swonderfully penetrating performance as Stevie Smith, the Bard of Palmer’s Green, in Christopher Morahan’s lovingly detailed and designed revival of the 1977 Hugh Whitemore play.

She looks spot-on – quirkily elfin with the pageboy hairdo and the shapeless crimson pinafore dress. But it’s the wry, astringent self-awareness that Wanamaker radiates and a kind of defiant drollery in the face of despair that convince you here is the woman who wrote “Not Waving But Drowning”.

Sporting a great leonine mane of grey hair, Lynda Baron is very funny and touching as the beloved no-nonsense Lion Aunt, Stevie’s life-time companion in Avondale Road. AndChris Larkin is effective in a variety of roles including that of the fiance whose crassness about their sexual encounter crystallises Stevie’s sense that her rhythms are those of friendship not marriage.

It’s a tribute to the play and to Wanamaker that the transitions between poetry and dialogue are startlingly seamless.

I once again commend Stevie, Hugh Whitemore’s delicate biographical drama about Stevie Smith, the Sybil of suburbia, which has transferred from Chichester to Hampstead, and if there is any theatrical justice, should head straight to the West End.

Whitemore seamlessly integrates Smith’s writing with her private life, in particular her failed engagement to Freddy (the versatile Chris Larkin) and her devotion to her ‘lion aunt’ (the wonderfully doughty Lynda Baron).

Christopher Morahan’s production is pitch-perfect and Zoe Wanamaker’s central performance is, if anything, even more incisive, wry and moving than before.