Simon Stephens’ early play (from 2001) is not easy viewing. In Sean Holmes’ revival it lasts barely an hour, but that hour is almost relentlessly occupied by psychological abuse, principally of 14-year-old protagonist Billy, who is somewhere on the autistic disorder spectrum, and is played excellently by young Max Gill, fully engaged in portraying a semi-detached character.  Billy is oppressed by bullying classmates, by his feckless father and passive-aggressive mother (who are separated); even by Adele, the nearest Billy has to a friend but who uses him as a prop for her own insecurity. It is unsurprising that the only way Billy can stand up against all this is by behaving in similar ways, only with less accomplishment. The tiny gleam, barely a single photon, of hope which usually persists in Stephens’ plays is less visible than usual here.

Not easy to watch, as I say, but hardly difficult to understand. It’s obviously set on and around urban river marshes, so there is no need to have flooded the entirety of the Lyric Hammersmith’s stage a few inches, simply so this predominantly young cast can squelch, splash and drip their way through the action in those water-retaining school uniform costumes. Less necessary still for a pair of giant lock gates upstage to appear on the point of giving way at a moment of maximum tension, torrents spurting out from between their timbers…only to stop again after a couple of minutes. Similarly, we can see how atavistic the children’s behaviour is, with thuggish Scott appointing himself the alpha male and threatening, mauling or battering off all challengers; no need, then, for a giant screen above the stage playing looped footage of assorted primates, and still less for all the kids to stop at one point to see a directly analogous bit of bullying amongst some mandrills at, gosh, a water-hole. If Holmes does not trust Stephens’ play to communicate these points (and he is sometimes a complex writer but hardly ever an obscure one), why did he choose to stage it? And if he believes it does say all this, then why the hell bolster it with such crashing unsubtlety?

Written for the Financial Times.