Anthony Weigh's first full-length play, a study of anti-paedophile hysteria, gets a better production and a higher-calibre cast than it probably deserves here.

That fine actor Ian Hart is a study in suppressed anguish as sex offender AG, who is forbidden by a new law to live less than 2,000 feet from a school or childcare facility - difficult in smalltown Eldon, Iowa. And that puppydog-eyed, skinny matinee idol Joseph Fiennes is wildly miscast as a binge-eating sheriff's deputy who may or may not have a dark secret of his own. Josie Rourke's 90-minute production is fluid and fast-moving, but Weigh's commendable refusal to furnish the audience with any easy moral certainties also makes the play annoyingly elusive.

And he does love a heavy-handed symbol. AG is first seen flirting clumsily with an underage boy as they inspect Grant Wood's famous picture American Gothic, depicting a pitchfork-toting farmer and a much younger woman. Cut to Eldon, where the picture was painted, and where AG, after an assumed scandal, is back living with his parents, who are preparing for the 12th successive year to recreate the painting in a fancy dress competition. Fiennes's klutzy Hallsy, meanwhile, adopts stray animals and collects Star Wars figures as well as comfort eating, all suggestions of diverted emotional urges. See
what I mean about the symbols?

Weigh is mostly concerned, though, with the way scares and subsequent hasty laws can backfire. Those covered by the sledgehammer 2,000-foot stricture - including a predatory "groomer" and a teenager who had sex with his underage girlfriend - are steadily harassed until they go underground.

A pubescent girl, meanwhile, is so warped by scaremongering that she pins up mugshots behind her Barbies and collects DNA samples in a disturbingly flirtatious way. The adult townsfolk bang on about Jesus while the threat of rough, vigilante justice (and the chance to get on TV) hang in the air. Towards the end, everyone starts talking in meaningful tones about the Pied Piper story. It's all a bit forced and phony. Fiennes is overly stagy throughout, not that this will bother those fans who have helped this play sell out already.

But Hart alone almost makes up for the awkwardness of the novice writer's script. With his shaven head and bat ears he looks like a police Identikit, but makes AG painfully human, if not necessarily sympathetic. There is good supporting work from most of the adult actors, and all of the kids, and a succinct set by Lucy Osborne that substitutes stained corrugated iron for rolling Iowan corn. This is an attempt seriously to tackle a highly thorny and emotive issue - even if it doesn't entirely succeed.

*Until 12 July. Box office 020 7610 4224,
www.bushtheatre.co.uk*