‘How many twelve year old girls have you slept with?’ asks Una of Ray, the man who sexually abused her fifteen years ago. She’s come to see him at work and her visit is unexpected and desperately unwelcome. They stand in the staff room. He urges her to leave, she refuses until the littered and bare space becomes a thrashing ground for the characters to remember and recount the experiences of their illicit relationship, which started with smiles at a family barbecue and ended with a six year prison sentence for Ray and a life of shame and resentment for Una.

But bad luck if you hoped the play would embody the scandalous quote which began this review, and which promised the usual sensationalism surrounding the issue of paedophilia. David Harrower’s play bypasses this sensationalism and explores difficult issues with uncertain and disconcerting answers. It is interested in the false security that opposites provide; Ray and Una are not only paedophile and victim, just as we are left unsure of right and wrong, love and hatred, and finally, then and now.

Not surprisingly, these are tricky roles to undertake and the production could have easily become excruciating for all the wrong reasons. Oliver Soden, however, played Ray just right. He wasn’t a sweating child molester: he was an over- worked fifty five year old man, defensive and convinced of his innocence, convincing an audience that he really had loved Una. I first saw Soden in the flawless production of The Chairs, which still remains one of the best pieces of theatre I’ve seen in Cambridge. Less impressed by some of his later performances, I was pleased to see him managing this role with subtlety and sensitivity- and in an impeccable Scottish accent.

Though Josephine Starte as Una was sometimes prone to overacting, she equally gave a solid performance. She could be a little too histrionic and not natural enough. But she was given many of the more sexually explicit lines, and it’s hard to ask a middle aged man whether he masturbates over you without sounding a little awkward. This is a play made up of speech and minimal movement, requiring strong actors who can sustain an audience’s attention. Starte’s longest monologue narrating the end of their relationship never became tiresome, pulling us deeper into the intricacies of her experience. Her commanding performance was complimented by Soden’s silent and tormented reactions behind her.

At the end of Nabokov’s Lolita, Humbert Humbert realises that the tragedy of the story is the absence of Lolita’s voice from the sound of playing children. Because of him, Lolita never had a childhood. In Blackbird, Una seems to be in a protracted state of childhood as she clomps around the stage in her oversized heels.  Una’s costume, a low cut top, tight pencil skirt and high heels isn’t the most appropriate get-up for a visit to see the man who took advantage of you. If the outfit seemed to display Una’s sexual empowerment, the audience quickly realised that Una was just pretending; just pretending to have gained control by finding him, just pretending to believe she understood her feelings. The question throughout was whether Ray was also pretending, could we ever trust that he was reformed? The play’s final twist startles and shocks, but ends the play still posing more questions.