MIKE Cullen's new drama is like a serious road accident. Your better judgment tells you to look away, but instinct forces you to stare hard into the wreckage. His subject is the contentious matter of recovered memory - the ethical and psychological debate about whether child sex abuse might be forgotten by the victim, only to be recalled many years later under hypnosis.
Cullen starts off with teasing scenes that show how easily our short-term memory can be mistaken, how frequently our concentration and apprehension might lapse. But his purpose is not to rubbish the phenomenon, rather to wrestle with the insoluble question of what to do when we take everyone at their word. So he wrenches us from one unpleasant extreme to the other - is it the tragedy of a helpless father rejected by his child, or of a helpless child subjected to parental violence? You can quibble about whether the father is ambiguous enough, or whether the psychiatrist is too much of a cipher, but in Vicky Featherstone's clear, uncluttered production with gut-wrenching performances from Iona Carbarns, John Stahl, and Anne Marie Timoney, you cannot quibble about the compulsive power of this material.
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