Sci-fi mixes uneasily with childhood fantasies in Gary Owen's The Shadow of a Boy: the fourth play in the new writing season at the Lyttelton Loft and one that raises questions about the National's Transformation season. It's hard to imagine what kind of audience the National hopes to win with this kind of inert piece that is no match for Owen's earlier Crazy Gary's Mobile Disco.
Owen's hero, Luke, is a 10-year-old Welsh orphan who lives with his pious gran and who enjoys an uneasy friendship with the pert, knowing Katie. But Luke's great escape is sci-fi comics whence he conjures up the figure of Shadow: an alien sent to earth to comprehend its people and judge whether they are fit to join the Glactic League of Civilizations. Contact with this comic-book hero teaches Luke to face the truth about his parents' death while filling his and Katie's mind with terrifying images of nuclear devastation. As long as Owen sticks to portraying the gaucheries of the over-protected child, his play has a realistic truth. Katie's attempt to induct the nervous Luke into the mysteries of sex is true and funny: so too is Luke's relaying of the kind of furtive boy-talk in which his contemporaries engage. But the use of an alien as a sceptical surveyor of earthly madness is a laboured device that produces only hackneyed criticisms: it needs no visitor from another planet to point out that our frenzied obsession with getting and spending is a distraction from the prospect of death and annihilation. Owen is clearly torn between a lyrical evocation of the loneliness of childhood and a scathing satire on the failures of civilisation. But the two don't easily mesh. While the Luke-Katie scenes hold the attention, you yearn for the vivid particularity of Peter Gill's Small Change, which places the agonies of adolescence in a precise social context. And the sense of period is oddly vague so that Luke and Katie's fears of four-minute warnings and of sirens from the nearby American base are more redolent of the bomb-haunted sixties than of the present. The result is a play that constantly shifts its narrative focus. But at least it is neatly directed by Erica Whyman and boasts a good set by Soutra Gilmour. Rob Storr has the right pudgy apprehensiveness as the lonely Luke, Catrin Rhys is all pseudo-sophistication as the knowing Katie and there is decent support from Lynn Hunter as the God-fearing Nanna, and Jo Stone-Fewings as the fact-finding alien. But one still wonders whether so-so fringe plays are really going to rejuvenate the National Theatre audience. · Until June 29. Box Office: 020 7452 3000