Toxic waste

Bruce Norris is a firefighter among dramatists. He runs towards danger while others sprint in the other direction. His Pulitzer-winning hit Clybourne Park studied ethnic bigotry among American yuppies and it culminated in a gruesomely funny scene in which smug liberals exchange racist jokes in public. The play was morally complex, dramatically satisfying and an absolute hoot to watch.

His new show, Downstate, co-commissioned by the NT and Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, takes on a far crunchier topic than racism. Child sex abuse. We’re in a residential home occupied by a quartet of tagged offenders monitored by a sharp-tongued probation officer. We meet the molesters. Fred was once a music teacher who thought it was OK to seduce the boys perched on his piano stool. Dee is an elderly queen whose underage victim died of Aids. Gio, a swaggering young buck, claims to have had consensual sex with a 15-year-old girl who showed him an adult’s ID card. Finally we’re introduced to sad Felix who tells everyone he still loves the daughter he violated. ‘Yeah, and my husband loves his golden retriever,’ drawls the probation officer, ‘but he doesn’t put his dick in its mouth.’ That gag, by the way, got no laughs at all but Norris deserves marks for trying to harvest comedy from this barren terrain.

He portrays the sex pests as remarkably erudite. The music teacher delivers lectures in the technicalities of Chopin, and his fellow-rapists bandy quotes from the Old Testament and François Villon. This sophisticated window-dressing is doubtless intended to keep snobs like me interested but it doesn’t ring entirely true. The play, at its best, throws up useful discussion points. Norris challenges the assumption — heavily promoted by the therapy industry — that rape is the worst experience a child can endure.