With his Clybourne Park (the only play ever, apart from David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, to win Pulitzer, Tony and Olivier awards), Bruce Norris became the favourite gadfly of liberal society: delineating the limits of our tolerance, showing our compassion up as often hollow. No-one in a Norris play gets off scot-free. Yet I can’t help feeling that there’s something just too pat about his latest, which arrives at the National Theatre from co-producer Steppenwolf in Chicago.

This is a risky position to argue, because Downstate is set in a group home for registered child-sex offenders. Its four inhabitants (I want to say “inmates”) have served their prison sentences but must still live in such a house, forbidden smartphones or Internet access, electronically ankle-tagged and banned from passing within half a mile of schools. Various of the quartet have committed incest, paederastic rape or underage sexual relationships where the law abolishes consent.

They are far from an endearing bunch: one is loud and lippy, another implausibly mild-mannered, a third endlessly argumentative. The “normal” folk they mix with are little different: principally, a former victim seeking emotional restitution from his abuser but under the thumb of his verbose wife, and the quartet’s probation officer, who makes no bones about persecuting the offenders in general and one of their number in particular.

Norris deftly skewers the denials and delusions of the offenders, but the trouble is that, even when portraying their antagonists at their hectoring and sometimes violent worst, he criticises the latter’s behaviour but never, really, their values. They behave badly towards the four, but not necessarily morally or socially wrongly. Cecilia Noble’s probation officer Ivy, in particular, led me to make a note paraphrasing the host’s catchphrase from TV gameshow Catchphrase: “She’s not good, but she’s right”...nor do I think this implicit valuation of her is damaged by the consequences of her conduct, which are sadly predictable from the other side of the interval.

The performances in Pam MacKinnon’s production are by and large flawless. Tim Hopper as victim/survivor Andy begins as a mouse but is gradually revealed to have anger management issues unrelated to his childhood ordeal; Francis Guinan as his abuser Fred, now elderly and confined to a mobility chair, is exactly as Andy describes him: too golly-gee to be convincing in his remorse. Above all, K. Todd Freeman as Dee clearly enjoys needling virtually everyone, but even when being more conscientious and supportive he seems to be acting out of a fondness for control. However, the poignant coda between Fred and Dee is so obviously contrived that it surely can have no genuine effect on the play’s underlying perspective.

At best, I fear Norris simply wants to have his cake and eat it by seeming to indict all sides but, in the end, insufficiently challenging the contemporary attitude that no judgement is too severe for such people. At worst, it’s just possible that subconsciously he subscribes to that very attitude, and the play’s supposed impartiality verges on fraudulent.

Written for the Financial Times.