Sarah has her head stuck into Sylvia Plath. Totally inappropriate behaviour for a Saturday night according to Sam and Sophie, who are glammed-up for a night at the local nightclub. Sophie proudly says she is pleased that she was "shit at school", because it's saved her for the important things in life - like lip gloss, micro skirts and the ingestion of alcopops. Sam and Sophie are pig ignorant and happy with it, while their childhood school friend Sarah, who went on to university, feels like putting her head in the oven.
Sam's mum is of the opinion that you can take the girl out of Bromley but you can't take Bromley out of the girl, but in Sarah's case inertia and alcohol conspire so she can't even seem to find her way to the station to make her escape. She is supposed to be bright, but she behaves like an idiot. Her friends, tired of being patronised and thrown up over (often simultaneously), are beginning to lose patience.
The main offering in the second programme of this year's Royal Court Young Writers' Festival, 26-year-old Emma Rosoman's The One With the Oven demonstrates that life for a group of friends in the London suburbs is nothing like Friends. The writing is sparky in a TV kind of way, but it never develops beyond something that feels like an adolescent strop from a group of twentysomethings who have discovered that life is not a bowl of cherries. Come back Jimmy Porter, all is forgiven. At least you were angry about something.
The same applies to the two other plays. Twenty-two-year-old Will Evans's Night Owls is a nicely observed but strongly televisual account of a relationship between a divorced father and his daughter. Seventeen-year-old David Watson's play Just a Bloke is a lively but small drama about youngsters trying to escape the past and find themselves as young adults.
The worrying thing about all these plays is that you come away from them feeling that the writers are wedded to TV naturalism and have no particular interest in exploring theatrical form, and that they are spurred by wanting to be writers rather than having something urgent to say. The future looks bleak, in more ways than one.
· Until November 23. Box office: 020-7565 5000.
