The woman is on the ground, we are told, consumed by grief. Her pain is immense. She gives herself up to it completely. She lets go, and pisses herself. The warmth is a comfort. Her teenage son is watching, though at first she doesn’t notice.

The scene is described, not enacted, but it is nonetheless a moment of exquisite humiliation. The woman has just learned that her husband of 25 years is dead. She has also learned that he was more than just unfaithful, he was promiscuous on an epic scale, driven by what Milan Kundera calls a desire to possess the endless variety of the female world. It’s a stunning image, this unravelling, and the highlight of Trudy Hellier’s brief, otherwise lacklustre, though beautifully presented, one-woman play.

Caroline Lee — always worth the price of admission — tries hard as the unnamed woman. She is grim, serious, very widow-like, very fragile. The woman meets her future husband at university, in first-year, at the cafeteria. They flirt, they fuck, they marry. She suspects he has a roving eye but pretends not to notice. They go into business together. Business is good. They’re in property development. There are children. Everyone else knows about his infidelities, and she is pitied, but, again, pretends not to notice.

“You would have done the same,” she insists. We wonder. There is something unappealing about her obtuseness, and the sad facts of her marriage. I’m not sure we don’t secretly long for her predestined mortification.

Callum Morton’s design is very upright, with a bare sort of monumentality. A sheet of white paper sweeps down from a long, narrow black box near the ceiling, between two pillars, also black, then along the floor almost to the audience. It’s all very severe, reminiscent of the black-edged cards once used for funeral invitations. Morton himself is a well-known artist, in fact one of the Australian representatives at the 2007 Venice Biennale. His work — his best work — always has a memorial quality, and an echo of something classical. That’s what we get here.

The woman recreates her past on the paper. Lee, standing against the bare white field, draws as she narrates, using a stick of charcoal, sketching in furniture, trees, names, dates, everything. The lines of her life cross and are recrossed, the paper is covered and recovered, like a palimpsest. It looks rather neat, but seems a little too obvious, this analogy with memory, the way things get muddled, yet can never be entirely erased.

The show runs for about an hour, and it runs very tight. Ian Moorhead’s sound design is a collage of white noise, interference and snippets from television, radio and police interviews. These snippets have an ambiguous status in the reality of the play. Are they hallucinations? Memories? Or real voices breaking into a damaged consciousness? Moorhead himself sits at a desk, stage right, occasionally inserting himself into the woman’s world, though always respecting the rules of the space she has created for her debasement.

Altogether, it’s a stark, stripped back affair. Even the text, which received an R.E. Ross Trust development award last year, feels carved down from a much larger work, as if it were the skeletal remains of a collapsed saga. Hellier’s style is plain, sometimes awkward, and yet there’s some intrigue in its thinness.

Where are we? Are we, the audience, being addressed directly by the woman? Is she conscious of being observed? What is the context of her narration? Twice the woman leaves the stage. We’re never sure why. She’s gone an uncomfortably long time gone. Perhaps we’re in a cell, or a hospital, or a laboratory. Or is it something more abstract? Is this hell? That at least would explain the otherwise mysterious title of the play.

I only wish there were more to admire in the writing, some fizz and freshness, because, really, in marshalling her team director Susie Dee has given us all the spare grace and seriousness of an Emily Dickinson poem:

After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?

Like tombs, indeed; but if this is death, or the cold form of it, what did the woman die of? There can be only one answer: shame. As Wayne Koestenbaum writes, a woman publically betrayed — wife or mistress — naturally excites our empathy, and empathy is the better part of scandal. The publically humiliated woman teaches us that we all live on the edge of humiliation. We feel for her because we realise that we too, anyone of us, might one day wake up, dead of shame.