Wasted

Four decades have passed, yet any artistic attempt to examine the Moors Murders still provokes ripples of outrage.

The resistance to any attempt at understanding what drove Myra Hindley and Ian Brady to murder five children in the 1960s demonstrates just how devastating an impact these crimes had on British society.

Henry Filloux-Bennett's Wasted has come under fire for apparently questioning whether Hindley - forever immortalised as a peroxide blonde with a terrifying death stare - should have been released from prison. She died in hospital in 2002 at the age of 60, having served 36 years.

However, the notion of whether or not Hindley's life was 'wasted' doesn't actually feature very prominently in this compelling but frustrating play. A newsreader informs us that she became a Catholic and completed a university degree. Interviewed in prison, she refers to the 'plans' she had for her life before she met Ian Brady, but never elaborates on what these were.

Running at only 60 minutes, there's not nearly enough time to delve into the relationship between the two killers, and we actually learn much more about Brady than we do about the woman whose eyes stare out from the posters.

Morgan Thomas is terrifyingly convincing as the dangerously intelligent, Nazi-obsessed Scot who believed that murderers were superior beings. The scenes in which he preaches his twisted philosophy leave the audience in no doubt that Hindley was to some extent one of his victims.

However, whether this means that she deserved a new chance at life, after actively participating in a string of unimaginably horrific murders, is a very different matter altogether, and one that a play with the limited scope of Wasted can't begin to answer.