Sylvia Plath’s Three Women, playing at the Jermyn Street Theatre in London, is something of an oddity. Broadcast originally as a radio play in 1962, the work is arguably more of a poem than a drama.

The decision to stage it is curious, especially as this involved two years of negotiations with the publishers and the Plath estate. The performance lasts just 45 minutes.

In the play, three different characters take turns to relate, in verse, their experiences of pregnancy and childbirth. One is a young wife who has a healthy boy, a second a woman who has a miscarriage, the third a teenager who gives up her baby girl for adoption. Plath had two children, and a miscarriage, and she writes powerfully about the blackness of loss, the agony of birth, and the intoxication of a mother’s joy in her newborn child. Many of the themes familiar from her poetry are here, of being “in love with death”, of being punished for a past sin, the cold and sinister moon imagery.

Three Women was written in the last year of her life, when Plath was at the height of her powers, and the language and imagery anticipate the later poems, as well as drawing on individual poems written in the preceding years. These were all later published in Ariel.

London’s Jermyn Street Theatre is tiny, giving little scope for elaborate props which would have been out of place. The action on stage is limited and unobtrusive, the focus always on the spoken text. All three actors convey a sense of character, especially Tilly Fortune as the secretary who miscarries. The women look at each other but never make eye contact. Each is in a self-contained world. The effect is especially moving when Elisabeth Dahl speaks lyrically of her baby, wrapped in a joy the other women cannot share. The power of the text confirms Plath’s status as one of the outstanding poets of the last century. But the staging of this verse is unlikely to lead to any great re-evaluation of her contribution as a dramatist. Till February 7. Box office: 020 7287 2875.