JANE COYLEreviews Transparencyat the Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast

On the surface, Simon Lansdowne has it all – a nice home, an enjoyable job, good looks, good friends and an attractive radiographer wife, Jessica, who is plainly besotted with him. But within minutes of the play’s explosively sensual opening, tiny cracks in their relationship are subtly hinted at. In a moment of passion, Jess begs Simon to hold her down and restrain her and, in that split second, the sexual spell is broken.

Slowly, more little tics in his make-up emerge – his opposition to having children, his conscious distancing from their friends’ young baby, his downright refusal to play Santa Claus at the hospital Christmas party. Former lawyer Suzie Miller, a highly regarded and widely performed writer in her native Australia, was commissioned by Belfast’s Ransom Productions to write this multi-layered, uncompromisingly provocative play about how an individual existence can be changed beyond recognition or repair by a single dreadful deed.

Its fast-moving series of snapshot scenes, which bounce with balletic intensity around Stuart Marshall’s translucent mirrored set, are directed with breathtaking pace and tension by Rachel O’Riordan to create the highly charged domino effect of Simon’s terrible secret.

Richard Dormer is almost unwatchably brilliant as a man who is anything but as he appears. Not even his name is his own. He has been given it as part of a new identity, concocted by the social services as part of his so-called rehabilitation process, after release from a juvenile detention centre, where he was held since the age of 10 for his part in the murder of a toddler. With his wife set on becoming pregnant and a child going missing in his own community, the demons come back to haunt him and the lonely, easily led boy of the distant past is revealed to be still at the core of his being.

Alexandra Ford gives a thoughtful performance as the psychologist who shores up his second chance; Richard Clements and Abigail McGibbon are Lachlan and Camille, beset with mundane marital problems, while Dorothea Myer-Bennett cuts to the quick as Jessica, repulsed by the revelation about the man she still loves yet fearful for the moral compass of the baby growing inside her.

Runs until tomorrow, then tours to Derry, Coalisland, Coleraine and Strabane