Danielle chats idly to Tim as they twist and turn on the kiddie's swings at a local park. The sun starts dropping beyond the horizon as their laughter fills the air. Still talking animatedly they get up to leave. Danielle, a 17-year-old girl, holds Tim's hand as they leave the park. Tim looks back briefly at the silently moving swings. He has spent a great deal of time here before, just sitting and watching those swings, sometimes with Danielle but mainly on his own. Tim is a paedophile. 
      Lucy Prebble's controversial play looks deep into the human psyche, investigating how we like to give bad things an acceptable face to make them easier to deal with. This theme runs throughout Sugar Syndrome, each character ignoring those horrid little facts about their nearest and dearest in order to keep their own lives tidy. Danielle's mother ignores her daughter's bulimia, Danielle ignores her Mother's pain at being left by her father, Danielle ignores what paedophilia really means. She thinks that Tim and she have many things in common. She believes that they are both outcasts from society. She even at one point equates his ostracisation with discrimination against homosexuals and ethnic minorities. She wants to believe that they can help each other to come to terms with their very different problems. 
      The cast work well together; the relationship between Danielle and Tim, in particular, is beautifully acted, and Will Ash plays a wonderfully doting boyfriend in Lewis, his hysteria and disgust at Tim serving as a reminder of the majority view about paedophilia. 
      Prebble's play is excellently wrought, and courageous in its engagement with taboo. Through Tim and Dani's relationship she brings home how society can demonise a given group of individuals. Controversially, though, it asks the audience to see the paedophile's point of view, and seems to argue that his ostracism and persecution are abominably unfair. She reduces the significance of what he does, and even romanticises it, and appears to oppose the hysteria it evokes in other people - until the very end, when she sets out to shock the audience with a brief glimpse of paedophilia's true horrors. For some this might not do enough to reverse the tenor of the preceding two hours. And in concluding that 'some people just can't help the way they are' she positively evades offering a stronger challenge to child molestation. And that troubles: for there are, perhaps, some things that one can never humanise.
Elizabeth Shenton