Sussex Arts Club, Ship Street, Brighton, Until Saturday May 15 plus May 20-22

"I have so many lines to learn my darling. Paul has done me such a huge favour - in a play of 25 pages, he has gone and put all my lines together!"

The winner of the London Writer's Prize, the latest pocket-sized tour de force from playwright Paul Doust, makes its world premiere at the Brighton Festival.

It also marks the return to the stage of charismatic TV astrologer Russell Grant who, naturally enough for a great-grandson of Sir Henry Irving, was a successful actor before turning his attentions to the stars.

When we catch him, mid-rehearsal, he's energised and apprehensive.

"I've never played the Fringe or Brighton so I'm excited but extremely nerve-wracked," he gushes. "It's just crazy, darling, 25 years after I came off the boards, I'm dancing around the Sussex Arts Club."

God knows where Grant's found time to squeeze in the dancing. Fast, ferocious and funny to boot, Doust describes his play as "basically just one bloody awful row. You know how many new plays are all, 'Oh, where did you put my bus ticket?' Well this is more like a mini Greek tragedy."

Grant plays the monstrous Maisie - estranged stepfather to Lance, carer to Lance's ambiguously sick mother and a man whose life's achievements amount to a 15-year slog at Debenhams culminating in the gift of a complimentary tracksuit top.

Doust himself plays Lance, "a young, good-looking, extremely wealthy property developer" and the "archetypal Mr Repressed" to Grant's complex bundle of Welsh rage. One day, the embittered Maisie pops in to Lance's swanky London pad (think mock Tudor, through-lounge, French windows and decking) and battle commences.

Doust's previous successes have included a stage adaptation of Cold Comfort Farm and a gender-bending Wilde pastiche entitled Lady Bracknell's Confinement. But here he has drawn directly on his own family experiences, placing two very modern dilemmas at the play's bleeding heart.

"We don't quite know what's wrong with Lance's mother," Doust explains. "But we know it's something ghastly. Of course, Lance and Maisie don't want to talk about it because that would involve putting their cards on the table. But it's what we're all going to have to face sooner or later, isn't it? With people living longer and getting more ill, what are we going to do with our parents?

"And then there's also a big question of property. I mean, my parents are sitting on a house that must now be worth a fortune and my brother and sister cannot stop twitching. It's vile isn't it? But people seem to get like that about property."

Especially if the property concerned is somewhere near the M11: Wanstead, for the uninitiated, is "the halfway house on the way to Footballers' Wives territory, where you live when you've made a packet but still don't have quite enough to live next door to the Beckhams."

Combining this knowing yuppie-satire with the traditional lynchpins of one-room dramas - Ibsen's devastating revelations and the highly strung emotions of Tennessee Williams - Doust has created a grotesque modern tragedy.

Flatteringly or not, he immediately thought of Grant. "Have you seen him put people down on the TV? He can pull out ferocity and hysteria in a big way.

As Maisie, he has these great arias and attacks and pathetic breakings down - right through every emotion." Doust laughs, admiringly. "Somehow it's not quite like acting at all."

Sussex Arts Club, 8pm, £4, 01273 709709