Almost 10

Perfectly pitched and delivered by Caroline Horton, this monologue slips from one obsession of precocious, prepubescent Rachel to the next with only a slightest hint of a pause – for reflection of the enormity of what has just been said.

This is smooth-as silk theatre, as Horton conjures up Rachel's world with her pushy mother, her best friend Hortense – the only friend to come to her ninth birthday party – her Barbie fixation, the unthinking anti-Semitism of her teachers, and her visits to the psychiatrist.

Whatever the situation, either sex or death is her fixation, the two great taboos which she can not understand. The gobsmacking lines of a child who knows about Hitler and the Holocaust and who says of her parents' holiday home where she is so bored that she watches the flies shit on the ceiling that "if I had been Hitler, this is where I would have sent the Jews".

Originally written in French, Daniel Goldman has translated and adapted the script to an English setting with such accomplishment that it is a shock to discover its origins.

Not quite the shock of the ending though. Having created a likeable, entertaining, bright little girl, Horton then allows the darkest of tones to overshadow her and makes us watch as she snuffs out the light.