Eight years after her sensational turn as drunken harridan Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, husky-voiced Hollywood star Kathleen Turner is back in the West End with a rapidly emptying bottle of bourbon once again supplying her principal prop.

But rather than reviving memories of her work in Edward Albee’s US stage classic, Stephen Sachs’s clever two-hander Bakersfield Mist is likely to lead audiences in the cosy Duchess Theatre to direct their thoughts towards hit plays of more recent vintage.

The first is Yasmina Reza’s Art, which is likewise about establishing the value of a picture and, at a comparable 85 minutes or so, over in plenty of time for dinner (so important to less . . . er, dedicated theatregoers).

The second is Alan Bennett’s A Question of Attribution in which, as here, the man supplying the valuation is a buttoned-up English art expert (Anthony Blunt) and his interlocutor in a debate about authenticity a savvy woman (The Queen).

But while Ian McDiarmid shows us, in Lionel Percy, a connoisseur very much in the Blunt mould — prissy, disdainful, shudderingly contemptuous of anything veering towards the common — the woman Lionel meets after his private jet flight from mandarin New York could hardly be more different from HM. Descending from his limousine in the Californian town of Bakersfield he is abruptly translated (via a snarling pack of her neighbour’s dogs) into the distressing company of blowsy barmaid Maude.

She is a hard-swearing Jack Daniels-swigging, chain-smoking example of the species known to those oh-so-egalitarian Yanks as “trailer trash”. (For Sachs, one senses, this makes her more real, more likable, than Lionel. We may not agree.) Along with the tacky furnishings and gewgaws acquired for her hellish shack-like home (designer Tom Piper) at boot-sales and the like, she has picked up for three dollars a painting that a local art teacher has led her to think is a Jackson Pollock canvas worth millions. Will Lionel agree?

It would spoil things to give away too much. Suffice it to say that having declined a whisky “to take the edge off” (“I would prefer to keep it on”), the ‘fakebuster’ soon relents, with some vigour.

This results in revelations and activities (including Lionel’s orgasmic depiction of Pollock at work) quite remarkable. So remarkable, in fact, that you feel some way from recognising a credible reality.

But, hey, here are two great actors about tautly directed (Polly Teale) work. Enjoy it while you can.

Bakersfield Mist
Duchess Theatre, London
Until August 30
Box office: 0844 412 4659 or bakersfieldmist.com