Traditionally an incubator for future playwriting stars - Joe Penhall, Michael Wynne and Rebecca Prichard recently passed through - this year's Royal Court young writers festival opened with two works that demonstrate their writers' promise, but make arduous viewing in their own right. Both fix an unflinching eye on emotional crisis. But they do so by means of characters that too directly confront their crises, giving neither performers nor audience anywhere to hide - or anything to intuit for themselves.
This double bill suggests young writers see theatre as a vehicle for heavyweight drama. They will learn that the ruthlessly stark presentation of that drama and its attendant angst do not alone amount to a satisfying play.
Fifteen-year-old Holly Baxter Baine's Goodbye Roy is about a middle-aged woman, Prya Lal, doomed to repeatedly relive her experience of child abuse. The play flashes from a conversation on the London underground back to the woman's upbringing in India. Designer Liz Cooke's tube-train slats lift to reveal a feebly gurgling geyser, which denotes the agrarian poverty that drives Prya's dad to brutality. The family home is tensely realised in Annabelle Comyn's production, although Antony Zaki struggles to characterise the father as anything other than monstrous.
Tantalising plot points - young Prya is told she's descended from a Scots missionary - are left undeveloped as Goodbye Roy returns to the present and its hysterical conclusion. This is a brave stab at a thorny subject but, by dramatising abuse through the eyes of an adult protagonist, Baxter Baine has made her job doubly difficult.
Twenty-five-year-old Leo Butler's Made of Stone gives guttural voice to the residents of the Sheffield community of Pitsmoor, where the writer grew up. Here, a mother and three sons are processing dad's recent death. Pete is suicidally depressed; loose cannon Miles is incapable of forming relationships; Gary is taking on dead Dad's responsibilities. Butler's premise is engaging enough but, with unsparingly naturalistic dialogue and circuitous pacing, the play develops more like TV than theatre.
The writing also lacks the sensitivity required to solicit our concern for ranting, objectionable Miles (Giles Ford) or sullen Pete (Greg Chisholm). But there are some likeable moments: Chisholm's Pete and Sarah Cattle's Carol handle their offbeat sex scene with comic delicacy; Joanna Bacon is attractively brassy as the tart-with-a-heart mum.
With some merciless editing, it could be a revealing, plainspoken snapshot of a family learning how to move on after bereavement.
