published on July 28, 2024 in blog

The Age of Consent

The state of grace ostensibly enjoyed by childhood seems like a decidedly grim place, at least if the young adults in Peter Morris' "The Age of Consent" are any gauge. Morris' intertwining monologues give us Timmy, a child-killer on the verge of his release back into society, woven with the tale of Stephanie, a frighteningly myopic single mother.

The state of grace ostensibly enjoyed by childhood seems like a decidedly grim place , at least if the young adults in Peter Morris’ “The Age of Consent” are any gauge. Morris’ intertwining monologues give us Timmy (Ben Silverstone), a 19-year-old child-killer on the verge of his release back into society, woven in with the tale of Stephanie (Katharine Parkinson), a frighteningly myopic 25-year-old single mother who is doing her (unseen) 6-year-old daughter, Raquel, in. The acknowledged murderer is as self-aware as the lethally ambitious stage mother is not, and yet the losers in both cases are the children in their orbit who are too young to sound the alarms for themselves. Does this thesis make a play? Arguably not, though Morris’ audience may not care: When a wiry, dark-featured young actor named Ben Silverstone takes to the tiny Bush stage, the unknowability of human behavior looms terrifyingly large, indeed.

If nothing else, “The Age of Consent” should announce Silverstone to a wider public, while positioning Morris as the latest in a long line of Americans (from Sam Shepard through to Adam Rapp) to gain a high-profile London perch within the intimate confines of the Bush. The play’s Edinburgh Fest preem last summer turned predictably inflammatory, given Timmy’s similarities to Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, the two 10-year-old boys who were convicted of murdering 2-year-old James Bulger in Liverpool in 1993 in a criminal act that has been headline fodder ever since (particularly so last year when the boys, now teenagers, were released from a reformatory, their identities changed, at age 18).

But Morris’ self-evident intention is less to feed off tabloid sensationalism than to examine that very aspect of a prurient society whose desire for knowledge would be more easily quenched if the perpetrator of the misdeed could explain his actions to himself. In Edward Dick’s staging, Mike Britton’s photo-studio set suggests a culture forever one step away from the click of the camera and the attendant thirst for titillation that such an ethos brings with it. “The Age of Consent,” at the same time, occupies the other extreme: It’s a social critique coupled with an attempt at empathy that resists trite answers while raising questions sure to trouble theatergoers well beyond the 75 minutes taken by the play.

The entire experience might be more satisfying if its two halves linked up more fully, rather than giving the impression that its (fictional) distaff element has been shoehorned into position to amplify and/or emend that male element of the play that is clearly based on fact.

While Silverstone’s alternately charming and defensive Timmy lifts the lid on a psychosis that he can barely make sense of himself, Parkinson’s eager Stephanie chronicles her daughter’s sally forth into a showbiz of the most unwittingly pedophilic sort: a mother unknowingly acting as pimp for a child whose claims on innocence have themselves been killed. (Far worthier of extinction: the reliance of the writing on a ceaseless litany of C-list celebrity names.)

Urging her daughter to project “the three Ts — talent, teeth, and tits,” Stephanie makes Mamma Rose seem a comparative mouse in her desire for recognition at whatever cost — even if it results in Morris condescending to the character in a way that Alan Bennett, whose monologues focus on the no less self-deluded, would never allow himself. Both play and player occupy firmer ground when the focus shifts to Timmy, complete with an “I’ll be one of you” finish designed to give us the creeps that mostly sounds like an affective ripoff from “Sweeney Todd.” (That musical, you’ll remember, also ends by implicating the audience as potential Sweeneys.)

I’m not sure we have to be incipient Timmys to be riveted by his sorrowful tale and by Silverstone’s almost alarmingly expressive performance — would someone this anesthetized really be so alert? Just when “The Age of Consent” risks walking the very sensation-mongering path that it wants to condemn, Morris makes us gasp with his depiction of one lonely man’s emergence into nobody status as enacted by a performer whose own onward trajectory couldn’t be more assured.

Jump to Comments