Anthony Neilson’s Stitching is a rather sick play. When it was first staged at the Edinburgh festival in 2002, it had members of the audience walking out, and last year the Maltese government banned it on grounds including blasphemy, obscenity and immorality. Built entirely of fragmented scenes between two lovers, Abby and Stu, the play moves around three different phases of their not-too-healthy relationship, and only reveals the correct order of the events at the end of a marathon of cruelty and gruesome details and sexual violence, passing through and touching upon prostitution, abortion, moral blackmail and particularly disturbing porn. From beginning to end, Neilson offers almost no relief from darkness and clenched fists, and even in the rare moments when he does, you are by now only wondering which unspeakable torture will be the price for these seconds of normality.

But having said all of this, Neilson is not simply out on a bloody and disturbing ride. There is most definitely theatrical method in his apparent madness, which makes his play more than just a gratuitous and indulgent exploration of the many ways to shock an audience. At the centre of all this horror is the death of a child, the play at its heart being a more powerful and perhaps less voyeuristic anticipation of the themes in Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist: guilt and redemption, incapacity for self-sacrifice, society’s changing take on parenthood, the roles we all play in our relationships. And so the difference between Stitching and, say, any episode of the TV series 24, is that the ticking bomb of what we don’t yet dare to imagine is, in this case, meant to do something to us, to force our faces very close to a human apocalypse. Which, though, will only happen if the production does justice to the text.

In the case of the version brought to Edinburgh by theatre company Sell a Door, unfortunately, this aspect of the play is failed in almost every possible direction. Protagonists David Ellis and Ally Thornton are, first of all and as it becomes immediately apparent, too young for these characters: not in the sense that actors of their age couldn’t possibly ever interpret Abby and Stu convincingly, but in the sense that they don’t. Their voices, their gestures, even their clothes speak in a not-yet-adult tongue. Throughout the fragments, the air between them, as well as their tone, their way of negotiating the space of the stage all remain invariably the same: not threatening, and not necessarily angry or desperate, mostly just annoyed, the way you would if the person you live with had misplaced the scissors, rather than if you were worried those scissors could end up in your chest. While the job they’re doing would be competent enough for a regular couple in a regular situation, this text demands a hint of psychosis and a viciousness which don’t seem to transpire here. The result is that we’re never really worried for Abby and Stu, there is never a point where it dawns on us that what could be seen as a normal, if dysfunctional relationship is in fact going to tread right into a black hole.

On top of this, there is the music. I’m sure the music was meant to do something very deliberate when it abruptly started and interrupted fragments of romantic Coldplay and of Bobby McFerrin’s ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’, scattering them among the scenes. Possibly, it was supposed to highlight how daily lives made up of daily details can become cradles of horror and reciprocal exploitation. And yes, the songs do come away from this production with a shade of added creepiness that I had never noticed before. But I remain none the wiser as to what the production should be taking from the songs. When Abby finally reveals the ultimate trick up her sleeve, what should have sent us shaking out of the room can only make us wince, and it’s really hard to even care.

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