We have the tools to enlighten and yet our world is darkening. We live in an era of pessimism and worry; we are hollowed out, lurching from crisis to crisis, with no faith that anything will improve, and no great hopes to sustain us. So what's the answer?

A small boy is driving his mother to distraction - waking at night, hearing phantom noises and fixating on his absent father.

Douglas attends an innocuous motivational course involving esoteric philosophy and mysteriously abandons his wife and child to "live in a specific, pre-ordained way according to the tenets of a spiritual leader." Is it a predatory cult or the solution to all their problems? And how can a small child be expected to understand adult thinking at its most complex and self-destructive?

His first dramatic work since 2007, Haunted Child marks the return to the stage of multi-award winning playwright and screenwriter Joe Penhall. With his trademark dark humour and sly observation, he poignantly explores the gulf between childhood and adulthood and asks disturbing questions about the lure of spiritual release in increasingly difficult times.