Ben Miles and Adam Arnold in My Child

In outline, the play might sound like a theatrical position paper put forth by Fathers 4 Justice, the civil rights activist group founded late in 2002. In fact, Bartlett displays a cunning to match those of his wounded, wounding characters, none of whom is as simply, straightforwardly aggrieved or bruised as they may at first seem. The writing catches you off balance at once, with a father—here called Man (Ben Miles)—making a decidedly odd wisecrack about breaking the arm of his nine-year-old son, Adam Arnold's remarkably unmannered, convincing Child. "I was joking, you thick bitch,"Man remarks to Lia Williams' Woman, who has left him for Adam James's moneyed, thrusting Karl—the only named personage on view and the new man on the scene whom the young lad has taken to calling "dad." What transpires along Miriam Buether's elongated, visionary set is a showdown over Child's well-being in which no one is free from personal gain or blame. That list starts with Child himself, who sullenly professes hatred for the very father whom he at other times wants to protect, his quest for bigger and better toys ("Simon's dad takes him to Hamleys," we are told of someone we never see) more readily articulated than his clearly indrawn pain.

[AD]Nor is the conflict between generations limited to the prepubescent. Williams' teary Woman is waging her own slanging match with her wheelchair-ridden, incontinent mum, played by Sara Kestelman with commendably little grandstanding and an absence of eyebrows. Slagging off her own mother as "useless," Woman would hardly seem to be a model of compassion, an awareness further complicated by the intermittent volleys of chat that Man carries on with his parents from beyond the grave. Proponents of decency in a world that clearly no longer can accommodate such things, the ageing couple prompt from Man the rhetorical question that closes the play—an oddly message-heavy ending to a hand grenade of a script that works largely by suggestion and ellipsis.

And by Wares' supremely smart production, in which any number of supporting players weave in and out of an audience that rings the action: some on stools, the majority standing behind. Man's quest for any available human contact is made plain via various Mamet-like split-second encounters that leave him lonelier than when he started. The same character's pleadings toward his son—"Is there a bit of you that loves me, or at least feels sorry for me?"—are rendered doubly desperate by the relative cool of Miles' astute performance, which includes an ability to reel under the blows of James's casually chilling Karl: a scene of sustained male-on-male aggression unmatched in my playgoing experience to date. (Oddly, the programme credits no fight director; presumably, the choreographer, Juha Marsalo, helped shape that encounter.) The violence proffered by Miles' clenched Man gains the approval of Child, who liked the sight of his father going "mental" rather more than he responds to an earlier litany of dad's achievements. Is hostility humankind's natural bequest? So it would seem, the protestations of Man's parents falling on disbelieving ears. And try though one would like to resist Bartlett's thesis as the ready cynicism of the young, there's something in the play's point of view, and its playwright, that lingers long after what one can only call the final round.

My Child
By Mike Bartlett
Directed by Sacha Wares
Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Downstairs