Something must urgently be done about the Shell Connections season at the National. A great idea - 10 new plays performed by 14 youth groups - is being ruined by a mixture of celebrity "hosting" and flatulent showbusiness hyperbole: I suspect it was even worse on the second night than Guardian reviewer Lyn Gardner indicated it was on the first.
The evening began with Gina Yashere - billed as "Britain's funniest black female comic" - leading the audience in a panto-style warm-up. It had a fatal effect on what followed: Jon Fosse's Purple, translated by David Harrower and presented by Edinburgh's Lyceum Youth Theatre. The play is a sad, sombre piece about a young guitarist in an amateur rock band trying to come to terms with his loneliness and loss of his grandmother. His only hope of redemption lies in a girl who, not unlike Solveig in Ibsen's Peer Gynt, offers him unquestioning love.
Anyone who has seen earlier plays by Fosse will know that he makes his point through an accumulation of seemingly banal detail. Although Harrower's version captures well the verbal and emotional inarticulateness of the solitary young, it was difficult to relate to Colin Bradie's production. That may have been due to the seemingly endless pauses between every line of dialogue or to the whoop-a-doop atmosphere induced by the host. You wouldn't expect Jo Brand to introduce an adult Hedda Gabler, so why interfere with Fosse?
The Crossing Path, by Maya Chowdhry, was colourful if barely comprehensible. It dealt with a fractious train encounter between a tarot-reading, militant, female environmentalist and a suave young capitalist: after he fell out of the train, they were reunited in a magical forest that seemed to represent the Jungian collective unconscious. Although well-choreographed, I'm not sure Craig Price's production for the Samuel Whitbread Community College made an impenetrable play any clearer. Nevertheless, Michael Brandon, currently playing Jerry Springer, appeared on stage afterwards to cover the production in such praise that it had me reaching for the sick-bag. Young people need concrete advice and constructive criticism: what they don't need is to be bathed in this kind of celebrity unction.
· Repeat performance of Purple, July 19. Box office: 020-7452 3000.
