Blackbird

Published Friday 4 April 2008 at 12:20 by John Thaxter

David Harrower’s powerful play about forbidden love between an adult male and an underage girl first opened in Edinburgh in 2005 in a melodramatic staging by the legendary Peter Stein, which successfully transferred to the West End.

This strongly re-cast revival is a new production for touring, directed by David Grindley, which sheds the unscripted final scene set in an underground car park and cuts 20 minutes from the running time.

Robert Daws plays the middle-aged factory manager who 15 years ago had a compulsive love affair with a 12-year-old girl. Now she arrives unannounced to seek him out - in Dawn Steele’s striking interpretation a self-possessed Scottish girl, fashionably but modestly dressed.

Set in a rubbish strewn locker room, their encounter is a touching anatomy of a passion shared rather than a challenging study of child abuse. But it also reveals the long-term effects each has suffered - he brutalised by a prison sentence, she a displaced family outcast who lost her lover in tragic circumstances.

Across the wide open spaces of the Rose, its stage raised to improve sightlines, the most telling moments come as the two at last discover what happened on a chilly night in Tynemouth when their lives were suddenly wrenched apart - each thinking they had been abandoned by the other.

Harrower may prefer this naturalistic, low key approach to his play. But the late plot twist when the girl, now an adult, realises he could only love her as a Lolita figure, is a theatrical device working against the torment and tenderness that have gone before.