Festival review: The List; Summerhall (venue 26)

List-making: we’ve all done it. For the protagonist of this one-woman play by Quebec playwright Jennifer Tremblay, lists are a lifeline.

Raising three small children in a remote house, isolated from her friends in the city and drowning in the minutiae of domesticity, it becomes a way of exerting some control over her environment.

It’s not that Caroline is exactly a friend. But she, with her innocence and her much more chaotic approach to motherhood (“the laundry basket in the living room!”), is different from the other “nosey bitches” in the village, and the two women fall into an uneasy alliance. Then tragedy strikes, and all who stood by start to consider their responsibility.

Maureen Beattie is superb as the nameless speaker of the play in this production by Stellar Quines, directed by Muriel Romanes. Within minutes, we have a sense of exactly who she is, a woman of disappointed hopes, who has attained the life she thought she wanted only to find that the reality is very different. Lonely, with demanding children and a failing marriage, she can barely contain her despair. “I’ve always been a bitter fruit,” she says.

In the wake of the tragedy come recriminations. It turns out the little task she never got around to might have prevented everything. It shouldn’t have mattered – yet it did.

Tremblay’s play is a delicate, subtle piece of writing, and Romanes gives it the gentle handling it deserves. The understated set is the work of artist John Byrne, with assistance from Roland Fraser, somehow conveying – though it is largely abstract – the windswept fields of wintry Quebec.

The strength of the production comes from the way it illuminates the small details of domesticity and motherhood, which nevertheless link in to primal emotions. It’s about small things, and how sometimes a small thing can turn out to be the biggest thing of all.

Rating: ****

Until 25 August. Tomorrow 2pm.