Michael Gow’s piece of Australian gothica, circa 1983, doesn’t feel like it’s aged a bit. There’s something about dying country towns, teenage delinquency and religious bigotry that infuses The Kid with a sense of timelessness.

Donald (Eamon Farren) is a kid who’s stuck in a small country town. He finds himself being semi-kidnapped by a group of tough kids from up north. Snake (Emma Palmer) and Dean (Akos Armont) are taking their injured brother Aspro (Andrew Ryan) down to the big smoke in a last-ditch attempt to claim his compo. Discovering that the aunt they were going to stay with has long since died is an unpleasant shock, and things rapidly go downhill from there.

The Kid is a strange and unsettling experience, sometimes in ways that I don’t think were intended by either the playwright or the current production team. Gow is very good at the subtler aspects of characterisation. The kids who take Donald along for a ride are for the most part obnoxious and thoroughly unlikeable. Yet there are moments of vulnerability where the tough façade drop to reveal a glimpse of lost child underneath. This makes it impossible not to feel a hint of sympathy, even when you really, really don’t want to.

Yet there are problems with some of the more obvious aspects of the plot. Such as, why would Donald take off with a bunch of snot-nosed, clearly psychotic brats in the first place? OK, he’s stuck in a dead-end town working in a bookstore for an effete intellectual with possible paedophilic tendencies. It’s understandable this might not be the most desirable situation in life for a young gent on the brink of manhood.

But Donald is supposedly lured away by Dean’s mesmeric mystique, and I personally just wasn’t feeling it. I don’t think this was Armont’s fault; his performance was one of quiet menace. He conveyed a sense of dangerous energy being barely contained. Gow has written Dean as being mad, bad and dangerous. This in itself is not enough to provide the magnetic quality that is meant to be the key to his character. The pull that Donald feels towards him is not really believable.

There are other problematic aspects, such as the inexplicable u-turn into American evangelism that, while being an effectively creepy segment (thanks to performances by Yeal Stone and Mark Pegler, and some excellent sound and lighting design), feels like a scene from a different play.

On balance, The Kid has more positives than negatives. The performances are all excellent, particularly supporting roles played by Kelly Butler, who does a great job playing a string of traumatised women. Pegler, who plays both the verbose bookshop owner and an abusive, menacingly taciturn evangelist, is amazing. Director Tom Healy and the production team infuse the theatre with the required gritty urban, and occasionally operatic, atmosphere. My skin attempted to crawl right off my body and out of the theatre towards the end. But, at one hour and fifty butt-numbing minutes, an interval would not be amiss.