Paedophilia: the last great award winner

CultureShockThe play Blackbirdis more a self-congratulatory game of taboo-breaking than a real confrontation with the unspeakable

In his programme note for his production of David Harrower's play Blackbirdat the Project, Michael Barker-Caven declares it "a miracle of a play because it dares, dares to look and look and look again at a space we have determined to be taboo". But is the space explored in the play, that of paedophilia, really taboo?

An almost exactly similar theme - a woman's ambivalent memory of a sexually-charged relationship in her childhood - was explored in Paula Vogel's play How I Learned to Drivea decade ago. Vogel won the Pulitzer Prize and the play was an international hit. Alanis Morissette had a big hit with her song Hands Clean, whose lyrics, narrated in the self-justifying voice of a man who has had a sexual relationship with an underage girl, might have come straight from Ray in Blackbird: "If it weren't for your maturity/ None of this would have happened/ If you weren't so wise beyond your years/ I would've been able to control myself."

The broad subject is almost a familiar one in contemporary culture, from the high delicacy of Visconti's Death in Veniceto the rougher realism of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Caryl Churchill had a paedophile in her classic 1970s play Cloud Nine. Recent hits such as John Patrick Shanley's Doubtand Bryony Lavery's Frozenhave issues of paedophilia and child abuse at their heart. Vladimir Nabokov's Lolitais almost a stock modern text, both in its original novel form and as the basis for film and theatrical adaptations. Alan Bennett's play and film The History Boysexplores the erotic obsession of a teacher for his pupils. If this territory is supposed to be taboo, then there are no taboo subjects any more.

If anything, Harrower's play suggests that, far from being an untouchable subject to be approached only by great truth-tellers willing to brave revulsion, paedophilia actually gets you noticed. If Blackbirdwere a two-hander about an 18-year-old girl who had an affair with a 40-year-old man, it would be seen as an awkwardly contrived and poorly resolved construct. Because the girl in question, Una, was 12 at the time the then 40-year-old Ray took advantage of her naive crush on him, Blackbirdbecomes a "controversial" confrontation with a taboo subject. So taboo that Harrower has been garlanded with prizes, including, last weekend, the Olivier Award for best new play of 2006. So taboo that productions are scheduled in 17 countries, including a big one on Broadway.

HARROWER WRITES GOOD dialogue, and Blackbird, as Barker-Caven's production shows, provides two good parts for intelligent actors - opportunities grasped to the full by Stephen Brennan and the luminous Catherine Walker. But it relies far more heavily on clunky plot devices than on any real exploration of its characters, who remain largely opaque.

The credibility of the set-up is strained: Una tracks Ray down after 15 years because, even though he has changed his name and moved to a new city, she happens to see a photograph of him in a trade magazine - a co-incidence that seems steadily more preposterous as the play goes on. The drama sustains itself with melodramatic twists and builds towards a shock ending.

Viewed strictly as a piece of theatre writing, Blackbirdis as mechanical as any French farce. Only its subject matter gives it the illusion of being at all innovative. And it has, in the end, little of substance to say about that subject. It uses the dramatist's privilege of being non-judgemental to avoid the responsibility to reach a conclusion.

This is in fact where the problem with so much of the recent theatrical interest in paedophilia lies. There is one recent play I can think of - Marina Carr's On Raftery's Hill- that is as dark, as relentless, as violent and as forceful as child abuse itself. Put it beside Blackbirdand you will quickly see the difference between a real confrontation with the unspeakable and a self-congratulatory game of taboo-breaking. But Carr's work is utterly untypical. Drama has an almost in-built tendency to distort the reality of child abuse. Drama needs conflict and conflict works best when it is between equals. ( Blackbirdgives us a fierce, almost domineering adult Una and a confused, defensive Ray.) Child abuse, though, doesn't happen between equals - its context is always a vast imbalance of power. Drama also has an instinctive impulse towards sympathy - humanising monsters is one of the things it is best at - and a deep love of mysteries.

These impulses mean that most plays that deal with the subject tend to tell lies about it. Because passive characters are dramatic death, the victims have to participate to some degree in the abuse. Because sympathy is the language of theatre, the cumulative portrait of paedophiles is weirdly positive. Because mysterious motivations and psychological ambiguities are the terrain that theatre naturally maps, the raw facts of power and exploitation tend to be obscured.

There is a case for playwrights to avoid the subject altogether, or at least to refrain from telling us how brave they are when they use it to add spice to otherwise banal fare.