There’s something of Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening in this sharp new play co-written by Simon Thomson and Emma Wright, a vivid and unsettling portrait of four teenage schoolgirls grappling with the mysteries, terrors and temptations of sex.

Larissa Turton, Alyssa Peters and Claudia Elbourne in She Threaded Dangerously. Photo © Karla Elbourne

At its centre are four girls – Mel (played by Claudia Elbourne), Sophie (Larissa Turton), Luna (Karrine Kanaan) and Natalie (Alyssa Peters) – a tight clique being riven by competitive streaks. Conversations swing wildly between worldly swagger and naïve misunderstanding. They all want to know more, feel more, be treated as something other than children, something other than vulnerable.

The girls’ lives intersect with various men in predictable/unpredictable ways. A substitute PE teacher (Leon Walshe) becomes an object onto which fantasies can be projected. Two private schoolboys (Walshe again, with Hamish Alexander) – no less ignorant and uncertain – make hesitant orbits.

Most troubling though, is the presence of an older man (Michael Yore) who strikes up a conversation with Sophie on a park bench. Our rock-spider senses are immediately tingling and with good reason. The encounter quickly starts to...