Moth is a dark play about bullying, the difficulty of teenage years and how cruel kids can be to each other–even when they are supposed to be friends.

Sebastian and Claryssa are those kind of friends: misfits who find each other in the schoolyard. Claryssa is a dedicated Goth, specifically a Wiccan, she says. Sebastian seems to be just an unpopular guy who is more interested in solitary pursuits like art, science fiction and fantasy than sport or any of the other activities on offer at school.

When a particularly brutal bullying experience leaves Sebastian traumatised, he seems to lose both his memory and his mind. He thinks a moth in a jar is talking to him, telling him the world is going to end and advising him to build a bomb.

Moth is hard-hitting, and quite depressing. The unrestrained language, particularly from Claryssa, tries a little too hard to portray that of a truly pissed-off teenage girl. The constant swearing seemed gratuitous and only distracted from the action, especially when the school-age audience tended to be titillated and wound-up by it, to the point where it cost them their attention to what was going on. And you really needed to pay attention…

Moth was, at times, hard to follow. Actors Dylan Young (Sebastian) and Sarah Ogden (Claryssa) gave credible, energetic performances and had deeply explored their characters, but when they had to take on other characters – their parents, teachers, the bullies themselves – with jump-cut dialogue and without the help of costume or scenery changes, they were on shaky ground. Mostly the transitions were smooth, but there were some murky moments.

One of the first questions asked by a student in the Q&A session with the actors afterwards was a genuine: “What happened in the play?” When Ogden explained, there was an audible moan of long-awaited recognition, not just from the student asking the question, but many members of the student audience.

The set design was drab (ripped dark-grey slabs of carpet on a darker background) with minimal lighting and harsh sound design left to enhance the action and announce shifts in the plot. The costumes were equally colourless, which for Claryssa was appropriate: a complete monochrome in black and white, almost like a negative image of the child she might once have been. While the design may have been a deliberate attempt to reflect the colourless world the teens find themselves inheriting, as well as the dark world of their imagination and their sub-cultural interests, it also seemed to lack imagination and oppress the dynamics of the play, making the experience two-dimensional.

If the play was trying to tackle the issue of bullying or teenage depression and mental illness, the message wasn’t clear. There was little or no redemption in Moth. Neither Sebastian nor Claryssa found help. A perhaps too-clever script, with a plot that twisted and turned, seemed only to say: life is hard, people are cruel, and when bad things happen, those left behind are tortured by loneliness and guilt.

It’s not that the play has a responsibility to do more than tell an entertaining and thought-provoking story, but when the action is confused and you’re left thinking you might have missed something, the experience can ring a bit hollow.

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