The Age of Consent

Raquel's ambitious mother Stephanie - "the sort of papers I read would probably refer to me as a gym-slip mummy" - believes in the three T's: talent, teeth and tits. While excelling in the former categories, Raquel is proving something of a disappointment in the last. Then again, she is only six.

Youthful child-killer Timmy will be released from prison in a few days time, a rehabilitated member of society. But then, "...there's not much difference between looking bored and looking rehabilitated."

The act of consenting is something of a paradox: a process whose active fulfillment requires a compliance, a passivity, potentially even a submission to the will of another. That this conflict is more than mere semantics is one point on which Bill Henson and his baying pack of detractors must surely agree.

Peter Morris's 2002 play The Age of Consent strips this issue (rather than its participants) of the modesty shield of abstraction, exposing the events both raw and real that lurk behind. We are not so much invited as forced at narrative knifepoint to decide who is qualified to hold power over another human life, who is capable of giving informed consent, and on what grounds.

The murders of toddler James Bulger and 6 year-old pageant queen JonBenet Ramsey are still fresh in the public consciousness, and form a provocative starting point for the play's two interwoven monologues, with their shared themes of childhood innocence, parental responsibility and social accountability. The combination of factual events and speculative drama is a potent one, and could so easily have misfired in the hands of a lesser writer or cast. Fortunately therefore both excel, rendering the hysterical yappings of certain media outlets both crass and obscene - characteristics notably absent from this production.

Ivan Donato's combination of winsome vulnerability and physical discomfort in his own skin render Timmy - the more challenging of the two characters -  a genuinely disturbing figure. Caroline Kemp charms, inappropriate though that may seem, as the misguided and narcissistic Stephanie who delivers her child into the hands of a paedophile. As she watches her daughter depart, "An artist and her muse going off to celebrate...", we feel a chill that no amount of overtly sinister characterisation could have induced.

Morris's writing is both elegant and assured, qualities which occasionally threaten to prove his undoing. "People are dying to get out of this town. Is it that much worse to kill?" asks his young murderer. Consistently prioritising verbal sophistication over the coherence of his characters, Morris places intricately worked and often epigrammatic lines into the mouths of Stephanie and Timmy that can jar with their otherwise disturbingly literal depiction.

Yet The Age of Consent is an intelligent and necessary play. Flawlessly staged by director Shannon Murphy and her young cast, it is content neither to pity or ascribe blame, but instead dares to humanise and complicate not only the most straightforwardly inhuman of crimes, but also the society that created them. "Miss Dunn, we are living in an age of consent."

Age of Consent is at the Old Fitzroy until August 23

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