Performed by Belgian teenagers, The Hamilton Complex forces us to adjust our worldview. In the UK, adult anxieties are stifling children’s cultural experience

“As a kid I never got to decide anything. If we treated adults the way we adults treat and speak to kids, we’d be put in jail,” said the Unicorn’s artistic director Purni Morell last month at the Share the Space conference, part of an initiative aimed at giving young people more cultural opportunities. I thought about her words while sitting in the Unicorn a few days later, watching the Belgian company Hetpaleis’s show The Hamilton Complex, a piece made by a group of 13 girls, all 13 years old, with director Lies Pauwels. “Are there any paedophiles here today?” asks one of the girls as they strut across the stage trying on disguises and identities, from air hostesses to Lolita, with a discomfiting swagger, displaying bodies that sometimes look childlike and at others startlingly adult.

Like women on Reclaim the Night marches, the mere presence of these girls on stage reminds us that it is not women’s freedom (to be themselves, to dress as they want) that should be curtailed, but rather the prurient way that they are perceived. What’s required is a shift in perception: a piece of hair twirled or teeth biting a lip is not an invitation to something else.

Like the extraordinary and extraordinarily beautiful Campo show Victor – in which a grown man dances with a pubescent boy – Hetpaleis’s show is constantly open to interpretation, particularly in the duets in which the girls dance with a male bodybuilder, raising questions around control, protection and power on stage. Nothing is quite as it seems. All certainties slip away in The Hamilton Complex, which is at the On the Edge festival in Birmingham tonight and tomorrow. As you watch it, you have to adjust your view of the world.

We make some terrific theatre with young people in the UK: work such as Brainstorm, created by Company Three (previously known as Islington Community Theatre), which is bold and brave and clearly completely owned by the young people who excavate their lives to remind us that teenagers are not just adults in waiting. They’ve got a new show, The Future, which I’m really looking forward to seeing at the Yard in Hackney later this month.

But I’m curious as to how easy it would be to make work like The Hamilton Complex in the UK – shows in which adults and children take to the stage and the kids speak truth to power. Hetpaleis have plenty more shows like The Hamilton Complex. Quarantine have certainly done similar work, and Fevered Sleep are currently touring Men and Girls Dance, which sounds fantastic but has not been without its difficulties because of suspicions on the part of parents doubtful about men and prepubsecent girls working together. When did something that should be normal come to be viewed as creepy?

Those doubts about what is and isn’t suitable for young people were raised at Share the Space, where several people talked about their frustrations over the way teachers and parents try to dictate projects. Only last year Ipswich high school for girls cancelled a booking for Out of Joint’s production of Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s Jane Wenham: The Witch of Walkern, citing their duty of care to their pupils, doubts over the language used in the production and the fact that one of the plot strands involves child abuse.

This kind of misguided overprotection that speaks to adult anxieties rather than young people’s interests is not at all good for our theatre culture. Theatre has the potential to provide the space in which difficult issues can be explored – adults and young people can make theatre together on equal terms, and watch it together, too.

“We try to teach our children certainties. [But it is] better to teach them nothing at all because the world is an uncertain place and it is facing serious issues. It’s better to be honest and say we don’t have the answers. It’s better to work out what to do together,” said Morell at Share the Space. Lies Pauwels and the girls in The Hamilton Complex seem to be doing just that.