The Age of Consent

Timmy, the boy killer and a thinly veiled mirror of Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, is an enigmatically written character through whom the playwright offers the idea that though these young men may have changed during their years in custody, society still considers them to be monsters. In a speech about playing Goldeneye on his N64, Timmy tells us that  he now has his own security cameras inside his head, he's read the books he'd never thought of picking up, and he's got the kind of education he "had to kill for". He craves forgiveness from his victim's mother but knows she wants him dead or "broken in some dark bedsit until ready to do the job for them". In performance Gordon Cullen, as Timmy, tries but his skills fall a little short of the complexity of the character and his Scottish accent garbles some of the dialogue.   

The second strand is  that of Stephanie, abusive, pushy mother of six year old child star Racquel, telling the tale of their climb up the showbiz ladder. From panto with Christopher Biggins to her filming of an advert in Italy, Racquel's abuse does not only come from mother Stephanie; she is also the target of a director's sinister intentions, something Stephanie seems oblivious to.  Played engagingly by Sophie Tilley, Stephanie is warm and darkly funny, although you're laughing at rather than with her. She drops malapropisms regularly and  draws you into her story telling. However, her performance is ambiguous as to whether she knows what's happening behind closed doors, and Tilley, in her warm performance at times makes you doubt whether she could be the caustic bitch she reports herself to be.   

Directed by Neil Duckmanton, this is a difficult play for a new company, and the direction ducks out of a few dramaturgical questions that the play needs answering in its staging - where are these characters when they are delivering these moments? What level of awareness do these characters have? There are other issues too, notably with the script which sits awkwardly between Alan Bennett's Talking Heads and Chris Morris' Brasseye Paedogeddon special; half earnest tale telling and half unwitting black comedy. Timmy's monologues increasingly wander in style from quasi-Beckettian mumblings into a tape recorder to a bizarrely meta-theatrical section toward the end. The production is an engaging if at times attritional evening's theatre - playing straight through for ninety minutes - and asks difficult questions surrounding the safeguarding of children in an original and distanced way. It's a good start from Duckmanton's Doris Day-Release troupe and hopefully there'll be more to come.