Given its premiere in Edinburgh in 2005 in an excoriating production by Peter Stein, David Harrower’s drama of abuse, obsession and transgressive desire has since been seen in the West End, on Broadway and in Sydney, where it was directed by Cate Blanchett. David Grindley has now revived it for a lengthy national tour, although his production doesn’t quite match Stein’s for its terrifying sense of psychological riot.

But it has other virtues. The conversation between Dawn Steele’s Una and Robert Daws’s Ray at times seems dangerously and deceptively ordinary. Yet beneath its surface lie razor-sharp shards of the past, ready to rip the thin skin of the lives they have built and the selves they have invented since the end of the relationship that scarred them. When Una was 12, she and Ray were sexually involved. He has since served a prison sentence for the crime and changed his name to Peter. Una, now in her late twenties, has tracked him down to a litter-strewn recreation room in the anonymous factory where he works.

But as she forces him to remember the disturbing details of what happened between them, it emerges that her rage and pain is the result not only of the violation of her innocence, but also of his betrayal when he left her alone in a Tynemouth hotel room. They were to have fled to the Netherlands together; and in the howling agony of Una’s desertion, the suffering of the forsaken lover and the scared, abandoned child are entwined.

Steele’s Una brilliantly conveys that discomfiting duality. Stalking through the squalor of food cartons, empty cans and plastic furniture – a potent symbol of their emotional debris – she vibrates with anger and excitement, plucking at her skirt and hair in gestures of girlish preening and nervous defensiveness. She taunts and torments, cries out for comfort. Daws’s Ray, puffy and paunchy, once believed her pre-teen infatuation to be adult love; now, faced with the woman she has become, he is no better equipped to deal with her desperately muddled feelings, or, frighteningly, with his own conflicting impulses. Physical violence, playfighting and sexual fumbling overlap as they struggle to express the inexpressible.

The play’s gaze is sensitive, steely and relentless, never in any way condoning but, rivetingly, refusing to condemn. The damage that Ray has done is obvious in every instant of Harrower’s writing and Grindley’s taut staging. There’s an occasional moment when the tone of Steele’s accusatory attack threatens to tip over into melodrama; but the effect of her fraught, insistent connection to Ray remains devastating. Deeply disturbing; entirely absorbing.

— Until April 5, then Arts Theatre, Cambridge, April 15-19; Oxford Playhouse, April 22-26. Touring until June 14 (www.seeblackbird.com).

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