And All the Children Cried, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds

Suffer the little children

External links

West Yorkshire Playhouse online

I was relieved to be neither a man nor a mother watching And All the Children Cried, a new play by a social worker, Judith Jones, and a journalist, Beatrix Campbell. Neither of these human categories is allowed a single redeeming feature in this relentlessly grim portrayal of factors, predominantly horrific child abuse, that provoke women to murder children.

Two women prisoners are putting their case to a parole board which could be us, the audience. We are told, in often graphic detail, of experiences that left them eternally frightened and humiliated and emotionally stunted. Who wouldn't be? This is complex, darkly compelling material presented under Annie Castledine's direction in an admirably non-sensational way, with moving and finely characterised performances by Sharon Maughan and Gill Wright.

But And All the Children Cried is flawed as a play, weighed down by the unnecessary baggage of using the name Myra for the lifer acutely aware of her own celebrity status both inside and outside the walls of her cell. The co-authors insist that the characters and their stories are fictional but the play's issues become muddied. By projecting the chilling 1960s mugshot of Myra Hindley on to a TV screen, the production is in danger of reviving her role as muse to the arts establishment, from Sensation artist Marcus Harvey at the Royal Academy, to the Manchester band, the Smiths.

The blurring of fact and fiction raises questions that both distract and detract from the play as compelling theatre. Could the tape of the desperate child's voice crying "I want my Mummy" possibly be extracted from the actual tape material Hindley and her accomplice Ian Brady made before disposing of their victims on Saddleworth Moor, not so far from the West Yorkshire Playhouse? How much credence should we invest in what this Myra claims as the root of her evil, growing up in a loveless home in an era that wasn't "all Jean Metcalfe and Uncle Mac", with a mother whose reward for unwanted sex was a pair of Aristoc American Tan stockings? To what extent is this cold, articulate character – the victim of a "demented freak control" – the Myra with whom the world retains a morbid fascination?

Gail, on the other hand, is the kind of unfortunate everywoman whose case crops up briefly on news reports with all too frequent regularity, "They don't bother about the likes of us [the underclass], we're always raping, beating and dying..." Her situation, seeded in a childhood in which her parents prostituted her and her siblings, often violently, as much for fun as money it seems, is more easily grasped. But would we, the audience, reach the same conclusion as the parole board apparently does here?

Despite the authors' commitment and sincerity in dealing with a taboo subject, this is more a knitting together of case history and academic discourse than a real development of issues, identities and structure which, despite the memorable acting, leaves And All the Children Cried unsatisfactory as an investigative drama and limited as a social documentary. But if it adds fuel to the debate about how society reacts to women (and even men) reduced to child murder, then it will have achieved something.

To 11 May (0113-213 7700)