A romantic triangle of sorts is explored in Edna O’Brien’s elusive and allusive new play, now making its U.S. premiere in a production imported from Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre. Featuring sterling performances by Niall Buggy, Beth Cooke and two-time Oscar nominee Brenda Blethyn (Secrets and Lies, Little Voice), Haunted  sacrifices clarity in favor of poeticism to detrimental effect.

A memory play whose events are apparently taking place in the mind of elderly widower Mr. Berry (Buggy), it depicts the relationship that develops between him and an innocent younger woman, Hazel (Cooke), who he hires for elocution lessons. In return for her services, he provides her with items of vintage clothing and jewelry that had belonged to his late wife.

Except that Mrs. Berry (Blethyn), who works as a supervisor in a doll factory—a profession all too obviously designed to make poignant the couple’s childlessness—is not quite dead. So she’s quite perplexed as her possessions gradually disappear, eventually confronting her hopelessly dithering, wandering husband.

The couple’s previously happy but now stagnant relationship is well delineated in such lines as when Mr. Berry describes his wife, at least in her younger days, as being “sturdy with remarkable thorns.”

The overly talky, mostly lifeless proceedings, filled with endless literary references ranging from Long Day’s Journey Into Night  to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf  to Shakespeare, are made palatable only by the performances. Cooke is charming and beguiling as the younger woman; Buggy perfectly personifies a middle-aged house-husband whose long dormant intellectual and romantic passions have been rekindled only to once again be snuffed out; and Blethyn brings her trademark earthiness and honesty to her role as the long-suffering wife.

Although she’s written several plays, including Virginia, based on the life of Virginia Woolf, the Irish-born O’Brien is better known as a novelist. It’s hard not to think that this dense piece would have worked far better as prose.

59E59 Theaters, 59 E. 59th St. 212-279-4200. www.59e59.org.