Daniel

Daniel is a boy who's desperately lonely, even as a crowd of people swirls around him. Footprint Theatre's devised piece leaves him as an unseen blank. But it traces his outline by shading in the lives he touches, in a considered portrait of how a group of friends deals with a crisis.

Director Elin Schofield's naturalistic approach emphasises that this is a very ordinary kind of tragedy. Its actors sit in amongst the audience, delivering a series of monologues as they try to process the news that Daniel has been imprisoned for downloading child pornography. His friend Harry (Jack Solloway) defends him, then embarks on furious flights of fancy that imagine what internet commenters would actually do with all the bollocks they threaten to chop off. Daniel's cousin Alex (Isaac Whiting) makes a haphazard bid for revenge with a toy cricket bat. Ellie (Immie Davies) looks at how porn blurs boundaries of 'okay' and 'not okay'. And Emma (Matilda Reith) is alone in seeing outside their broken circle, to the unknown children involved.

The friends' inward-looking approach means that the performance says as much about being young as it does about Daniel's actual crime. Harry's lines are some of the most moving of the piece, as he cries out that his childhood memories are being repackaged as evidence. Some of the other monologues lose their way a little, giving the piece a faintly circular feeling. But what this promising young company have done brilliantly is to offer a 360-degree view of a boy who's invisible – but whom no one can quite forget.