ON paper the award-winning Duet For One should hit a wrong note. There's something voyeuristic about sitting in on repeated sessions between a profoundly depressed disabled woman and her psychiatrist.

And how could their verbal parrying keep audiences tuned in for 150 minutes without falling flat ?

But the struggle of acclaimed concert violinist Stephanie Abrahams to come to terms with a terrible disease made for compelling drama.

Milton Keynes Theatre opened their autumn season on Tuesday with a powerful performance from Juliet Stevenson as a brilliant and obsessed musician who must face up to being unable to play another note.

Anyone who plays a musical instrument will understand her frustration. Certainly there are similarities here with the struggles of cellist Jacqueline Du Pré in coping with MS.

Stephanie had dedicated her life to the violin, often having to fight her own own father for the right to perfect her art. Suddenly she is cruelly robbed of her life's passion.

Sensing her anger and recognising a creeping malaise her husband packed the musician off to psychiatrist Dr Alfred Feldmann, a man, it must be said, with his own emotional baggage to contend with.

The stage was then set for a series of sometimes violent confrontations between the pair.

This two-hander relies heavily on Stevenson's astounding performance as a woman coping with multiple sclerosis. She apparently psyches herself up prior to each performance before taking to her wheelchair and throughout she subtlety adopts the tics and physical deformities of an MS sufferer. Who says you don't suffer for your art ?

Abrahams first enters looking elegant and coiffured and as fastidious about her clothes as her music.

But over the course of the drama she changes from a feisty but fragile fighter to, as her condition worsens, a bitter, suicidal, depressive wallowing in self-pity.

Gone is the smart attire and ballsy attitude to be replaced with unkempt hair, scruffy appearance and ever blackening thoughts.

Can the good doctor save her and how much of her condition is caused by the increasing use of the prescription drugs he gives her ?

Henry Goodman's performance as the music-loving Herr Feldmann is intelligent and generally quiet and understated. He sits, absorbing everything that is unsaid before battling with his reluctant patient.

It's not so much a Duet For One but a duel a deux.

His German accent was rather strong, even causing his patient to call it "phony" and, convincing though he was, I'm not sure I'd pay him £200 an hour to be driven to the brink of suicide.

The action takes place entirely in Feldmann's consulting room which is packed full of CDs as well as books and it's an impressive set from Les Brotherston.