It takes a special kind of daring to tackle a subject such as the massacre at Columbine high school in Denver close to the event. Award-winning playwright Peter Morris did just this last year with The Second Amendment Club, and managed to pull some kind of sense from the pile-up of emotions that surrounded the teenage killers.
Morris's The Age of Consent, meanwhile, weaves two monologues, one of which attempts to divine the mind of a teenage child-killer on the eve of his release. This comes soon after the release of Robert Thompson and Jon Venables into a halfway house: the timing could not have been more apt or insensitive, depending on your view of what theatre should do. Morris suggests that while these killers may have changed during their years in custody, society still considers them "evil monsters".
Timmy, the boy killer played with chilling lightness by Ben Silverstone, pleads that he now has his own security cameras inside his head, having read "hard books" and got the kind of education he "had to kill for". He craves forgiveness from his victim's mother - "She will not forgive herself [for looking away] for that five minutes, and I won't too" - but knows she wants him dead or "broken in some dark bedsit watching Family Affairs until I'm ready to do the job for them".
There's another taboo in the second story of Stephanie, an abusive mother played by Katherine Parkinson. She not only climbs the showbiz ladder on the back of her six-year-old daughter Racquel, but delivers her into the hands of a paedophile.
Predictably, The Age of Consent has whipped up a hurricane of opprobrium. For once, however, the play at the eye of an Edinburgh storm is a good one.
Until August 19. Box office: 0131-556 6550.
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