Thirteen-year-old Joe likes football and karate and lives on a West Midlands housing estate. When his best mate goes missing, suspicion immediately falls on the next-door neighbour Bill, a lonely soul whose hobbies include building dry stone walls and peering creepily over the top of them.
Tamsin Oglesby's play doesn't yield up its meaning easily, nor does it revolve around a clear centre. Instead she devises a skewed composite of off-kilter encounters featuring a disparate group of slightly damaged individuals obliquely implicated in the case of the missing boy.
Stranded upstage in a stalled railway carriage are a bickering old couple whose pet names for one another are Twit and Twat. The woman's exotic headgear possibly identifies her as a bothersome neighbour of Joe's mum Michelle, a self-obsessed single parent who not only forgets her son's birthday, but fails to remember that 13-year-old boys require feeding from time to time. And if that were not quite enough weirdoes for an evening, Oglesby adds a disaffected Big Issue seller with whom Bill, the suspected child-botherer, forms an unusual alliance.
There are times when Oglesby lays on the perversity a little thick: when the man in the railway carriage has a sudden, existential panic attack in response to a piece of lettuce, you wonder if she is going to allow too many kooks to spoil the broth.
But Oglesby is notably successful in her ability to tackle taboo themes such as social isolation and mental disturbance with a non-judgmental lightness of touch. She is well-served by a vivaciously funny production by Lynne Parker that is full of subtly characterised, teasingly ambiguous performances.
Jonathan Coyne is compelling as Bill, the autistic, bug-eyed loner, and Mikey Lightfoot outstanding as the young boy who touchingly befriends him. It all adds up to quite the most lovable play about child abuse and social inadequacy you'll see all year.
· Until 3 December. Box office: 0121-236 4455.
