The improper rationing of parental affection is a given in Mr. Zeller’s plays, which also seem to favor old men named André and annoying characters named Anne. (Aside from the current Anne, there’s one in “The Mother,” “The Father” and also “The Son,” which opened in London in February.) It is probably unprofitable to read any meaning into these echoes; their randomness, reshuffled, seems to be the point. We can never know anyone, even if we know their names all too well.

Filled with such thin insights, the play, though brief, is not as brief as one’s interest in it. Just as in “The Father” and “The Mother,” it palls the moment you fill in the outlines of the puzzle, and palls even further when you see that the middle has been booby-trapped to remain unsolvable. (Mr. Zeller keeps changing the rules.) By the end, it’s not so much that you don’t know who died as that you don’t care.

Or you wouldn’t care if not for Mr. Pryce and Ms. Atkins, who face the adversity of the text in contrastingly and compulsively watchable ways. Mr. Pryce pours himself into every cranny of his character’s contradictions: sometimes snappish, sometimes pathetic, always transparent. He even trembles gorgeously — not just his right hand but his face and at times his whole body.

Ms. Atkins doesn’t shake. She’s not transparent, either; like most humans, she’s effortlessly opaque. Since Madeleine is too — she’s one of those mothers whose idea of comfort does not involve much comforting — it’s a perfect match. It would be hard to say who is less indulgent: the actor swatting away emotion or the mother whose daughters might as well be the mushrooms she peels so perfectly.