Simon says that in his small South African town nothing much ever happens. It is dead, like the eyes of his friend Ruth, whom he has loved from a distance since he was 11. But if you look beneath the surface - and the spectacles on sticks growing out of the chimneys of the tiny township houses indicate that you should - a lot is happening. Awful things. As the adults drink themselves into a stupor they turn a blind eye to the children.
When a child disappears nothing happens, and when another is beaten to a pulp and a teenage girl pimped by her brother for a comic and five cents nothing happens. Only when a baby is found in a field, raped and sodomised, do people start to realise that something has happened.
Inspired by the "20,000 true stories" of children who are raped each year in South Africa, Lara Foot Newton's play is a virtual monologue and yet there are always two people on stage. The silence of Ruth the teenage mother who was drunk while her child was violated - a tiny bed wrapped around her back like a symbol of guilt - is desperately eloquent.
On the surface this is a very simple piece of storytelling theatre. But it has a sophistication that only gradually begins to surface both in the writing and in Gerhard Marx's design, which offers up signs, symbols and clues in a story that opens your eyes to some realities of modern South Africa.
The piece perhaps lacks political analysis of the social and economic reasons why these terrible deeds occur, but it paints a vivid portrait of a town cut off by poverty and hopelessness from its own heart; a media who only want the juicy details and a world where powerless people are trying slowly and painfully to take responsibility and learn to love again.
· Until October 16. Box office: 020-7229 0706.
