LOVE is blind, particularly on heroin. "When I first met Candy, everything was wonderful, " Heath Ledger enthuses in voiceover. Cut to him . . . his name is Dan . . . trying to revive Abbie Cornish, who has overdosed in the bath. "I wasn't trying to wreck Candy's life, I was just trying to make mine better, " he continues. By now she's on the streets, trying to pay for their habit. She asks why he doesn't pick up men in lavatories to help out. "I'd be hopeless at that, you know I would, " he says. He gets high at their ill-judged wedding, her bewildered parents trying not to notice, helpless as she slides away from them. "Do you think we should stop?" he asks that night, as they inject. "You mean, now that we're respectable?"

They're oblivious to anything other than their passion for each other and their wild abandonment to pleasure, but with their constant need to score the dream turns sour. She's no longer able to paint. He has stopped writing poetry. She begins complaining about "this nightmare you led me into".

"Like I held a gun to your head, " he retorts.

Their mentor is a hippy university chemistry professor (Geoffrey Rush) who takes his work home with him to what they call "our Gingerbread House". He gives them money for heroin, and has helpful advice on picking up men. "He's like the dad you always wanted, who lets you have lots of lollies, " marvels Dan.

Having already played the Marquis De Sade, the role is a doddle for Rush, catching just the right nuance of sad irresponsibility.

Abbie Cornish, the broken runaway girl in Somersault, brings to her portrayal of Candy the same unsettling sense of fragility and wild abandon. Her dangerous unpredictability frightens even Dan, still more her parents whose over-protectiveness may have made her what she is. Heath Ledger is perhaps more Monster's Ball than Brokeback Mountain. He is again a man who needs to belong but doesn't, except this time an ability to articulate himself provides the window through which we enter into the couple's relationship.

Neil Armfield is to Australian theatre what Sam Mendes is to the West End, a director who can bring out the chemistry between actors and push them to performances they hardly dared imagine themselves capable of . . .

particularly when the couple attempt to go cold turkey, their desperation culminating in a miscarriage of heartbreaking believability.

Candy is a dark romance of fearless intensity from which there seems no escape, although the open ending hints at perhaps some reconnection with the real world.

"Everything we ever did we did with the best intentions, " Dan assures us, in voiceover.