Once upon a time, six-year-old Ruby Moon sets off to visit her grandmother at the other end of her quiet suburban cul-de-sac. She never arrives. All that is found of her is a doll and a butterfly hair clip.
Time has passed, the newspapers have stopped printing Ruby's picture, the "grief tourists" no longer come to gawp, the neighbours don't bring soup; even the police have given up calling. But for Ruby's parents, Ray and Sylvie, the story has no ending. They live it every day: laying a place at the dinner table for the child who never comes home, replaying granny's answerphone message, refusing to move in case the child miraculously returns and finds nobody there, reliving their guilt at not being there when their daughter really needed them.
Northern Stage's production of Matt Cameron's 2003 play was scheduled long before the abduction of Madeleine McCann. While that case lends it an extra poignancy, Ruby Moon is a fine, truthful and beautifully layered play in any event. It painstakingly unpicks the nature of grief, the secret lives of children and adults, the desperate loneliness of community, what it means to lose and be lost and the desperate games we play when the nights are long and sleep never comes.
This is a play within a play, and the games begin as soon as you enter the theatre. Soutra Gilmour's design is as much an installation as a conventional theatre set, simultaneously representing the neighbours' houses and Sylvie and Ray's living room. Erica Whyman's production skips brilliantly between the unbearably raw and the creepily playful. Playing the two leads and a host of other parts, Tilly Gaunt and Nick Haverson are spot-on. Unhappy ever after has never been so desperately compelling.
· Until Saturday. Box office: 0191-230 5151.
