When the film star made her West End stage debut in an updated version of Molière’s The Misanthrope in 2009, she got through it with her dignity intact, but often seemed strained and nervous, as well as alarmingly thin.

She certainly didn’t strike me as a natural stage actress, and I assumed she would stick to the movies where she has enjoyed such conspicuous success.

But here she is, back again at the Comedy Theatre, and giving a performance in Lillian Hellman’s sometime creaky old melodrama, The Children’s Hour, which displays confidence throughout before rising in the final act to dramatic heights that are shattering in their intensity and deeply affecting.

But the whole of Ian Rickson’s atmospheric, slow-burning and ultimately enthralling production proves far more compelling that I expected.

Though no masterpiece, The Children’s Hour has sturdy dramatic strengths, and one suspects that Arthur Miller must have learnt from it when writing The Crucible.

Like that play, it concerns hysteria among teenage girls, and a malign leader among them who brings catastrophe down on the heads of adults. But witchcraft isn’t the charge brought against innocent characters here, but lesbianism, making the play exceptionally daring for the 1930s. Indeed, although The Children’s Hour enjoyed big success in New York, it was banned from the British stage until as late as 1960.

The play is set in a girls’ school in New England run by two close female friends in their twenties. But one of their pupils is a troublemaker, a female Jimmy Cagney in a gym tunic, and when she gets into trouble she visits her grandmother and tells her that she has seen and heard the two teachers in sexual dalliance. Though she is a noted liar, she is believed after she blackmails a fellow pupil into supporting her story. Catastrophe follows.

The play is far from perfect. It’s hard to believe that the grandmother (Ellen Burstyn) would fall so readily for her grandchild’s accusations, and though she is sometimes entertaining, the preposterous old actress who gives elocution lessons at the school doesn’t earn her dramatic keep, despite the sometimes laborious comic endeavours of Carol Kane.

But the strain on the relationship between Knightley’s Karen, and her friend and colleague Martha, whose sexuality is tantalisingly open to question throughout the play, is beautifully caught, with Mad Men actress Elisabeth Moss giving a fascinatingly conflicted performance that is as subtle as it is strong. The result is that in the bleak last act the play seems to move beyond melodramatic entertainment into something approaching genuine tragedy and Knightley’s final abandoned despair is harrowing to behold.

There’s strong support from Tobias Menzies as her decent fiancé, while Bryony Hannah is memorably sly and horrible as the young troublemaker.

This is a powerful night in the West End and Knightley has impressively won her theatrical spurs.

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The star will be joined by Elisabeth Moss, best known as Peggy Olson in the award-winning series Mad Men.

Knightley, last seen on stage in The Misanthrope at the Comedy Theatre, will play a teacher at a girls’ boarding school in the new production.

Her new film – Never Let Me Go - opened this year’s London Film Festival.

Moss, who is set to make her West End debut, has also appeared in the movies Get Him to the Greek, Did you Hear About the Morgans? and Girl, Interrupted.

In the play, teachers – played by Knightley and Moss – are accused by a disgruntled student of having a lesbian relationship.

The Children’s Hour was last produced in London by the National Theatre in 1994 and was written by Lillian Hellman in 1934.

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