Who does the National Theatre belong to? Us, of course. But it doesn't always feel like that. Even with Nick Hytner in charge, the National often feels as if it is for them. But for one week of the year it feels genuinely national and truly ours when young people from schools and youth groups from all over the country take over the Cottesloe.
What makes Shell Connections more than tokenism is not just the quality of the productions and acting, but the fact that some of the best writers in the country are commissioned to write the pieces. This year's include Patrick Marber, Bryony Lavery, April de Angelis, Judith Johnson, Philip Ridley and Simon Armitage. Snoo Wilson has even written a musical with Gary Kemp and Guy Pratt based on Mayakovsy's The Bedbug. We are talking ambition here.
Quite how ambitious was demonstrated on opening night with Lavery's Discontented Winter: House Remix, a modern satire of dark Jacobean proportions set in a fast-forward world where a latter-day Richard III and some top totty plot to kidnap the heir to the throne and his younger brother. It offers some hard and hilarious truths about modern British society in cartoon form.
More traditional but no less entertaining is Marber's The Musicians, about a school orchestra's trip to Russia where the young would-be conductor forges an unlikely friendship with the concert hall cleaner, a Who fan and would-be Pinball Wizard. Marber's play and the production from Castleford High School sum up the essence of Connections: the transforming possibilities of art. It is only a pity that for the second year running, the first night was marred by patronising compering. If the National takes this work seriously it should get Hytner to host, not second-rate comics who think they are whipping up a primary-school audience.
· Until July 13. Box office: 020-7452 3000.
