Around three years in the making, the play takes us into a “protected”, gated suburb called Wickfield where, as Barry Humphries might have said everything is “niceness” and no unpleasant realities intrude.

Five cast members bearing generalised character names such as “new kid”, “little brother” and “leader”, represent the perfectly controlled children of the suburb, coerced into participating in the ridiculous annual National Safe City Lights Competition.

They’ve been brought into line for the whole of their young lives by a series of inducements and punishments – and like their parents, they know nothing whatsoever of the outside world. It is a metaphor for Australia? Or the US? Or the entire Western world? The Styrofoam snow suggests an international setting.

These children, played by Natalie Morris, Alice Fairweather, Monica Canning, Georgina Holt and Yarno Rohling, are full of natural energy, seen in their lively, graceful movements, often reflected in a upstage video screen, around Hanna Sandgren’s elegant raked stage.

Their characters are well-distinguished, but they share an  inner emptiness,  revealed to us in a series of direct addresses to the audience from a microphone downstage. One tells of a momentary “lapse” when she spends her pocket money on sponsoring overseas children, only to come to her senses and buy a game instead.

In the time-honoured manner of drama, an “intruder” appears from the outside world. Is she a refugee? (sympathetic murmurs from the audience at this suggestion). Is she spying on their silly competition plans? Is she even human or rather, just like a dog, to be kicked around? When the kids capture and torment her, the play turns nasty, with intermittent moments of laughter only.

But the intruder, played with a degree of passionate intensity by Laura Chung setting her character apart from the other children, is able to move at least one of them and ultimately convinces the group of the dire peril in which they live.

The colourful end of this play, full of light and anguish, hints at more than it tells, and certainly does not solve all the moral problems the play throws up. But it leaves you thinking – and, be warned, you’ll never hear a Mr Whippy van playing “Greensleeves” again without a shudder of fear.