Adolescents are apt to surprise their elders with crocus-bursts of talent or cheek, and when they can do it in front of a whole crowd of adults, so much the better. Sixteen-year-old Emmanuel De Nasciemento had a good stab at it in the second part of the Royal Court's young writers' festival.
In his short play Drag-On, the plot - boy meets girl, discovers girl is actually a boy - was carried by the sheer energy and vernacular crispness of the jittery young man Ziggy, played by Johann Myers. There were some vivid touches and great one-liners, such as: "She plays you like a Gameboy." But theatre is an exacting medium, and Ziggy's move in a matter of minutes from young black man seeking pussy to lovestruck, sensitive gay Romeo rang all the wrong bells.
At 23, Arzhang Pezhman, recently graduated from an MA in playwriting at Birmingham, has had longer to hone his skills. Local was a red-blooded creature thrashing with real-life passions and concerns of its own. Set in a Wolverhampton newsagent's, the play focused on Merdod (Raad Rawi), an Iranian immigrant left by his British wife to bring up his son Darius (John Marquez) alone.
Darius was back from college; things had changed. His father's old friend, Ardeshir, had become competitive; Jeff, the alcoholic, racist neighbour, was increasingly abusive; Yas, Ardeshir's daughter, was a sudden new love interest.
Pezhman writes clear-sightedly and dumps the fond illusions of youth for something more gritty. In the first scene, Jeff, played with a well-judged dose of contempt by Alan Williams, bumbled into the newsagent's at five in the morning, demanding whisky.
Darius, a patient type but gradually riled, danced bitterly around him in clever wordplay, leading Jeff to later accuse him of "using my language to get the better of me". With that, he put his finger on the slippery theme of ownership, which glistened rudely at every twist of the play.
Kim and Rob Wilcox (Tricia Kelly and David Armand) were a warm-hearted mother-and-son combo who sprinkled light relief upon situations engulfed by the weight of racial, generational or cultural grievance or bogged down in bouts of ideology and exposition. Mostly, though, the dialogue somersaulted deftly around, showing Pezhman capable of hoisting and sustaining tension around issues as tricky as riots for more than an hour.
The biggest letdown was the ending, which abruptly pulled the curtain on one of the play's main characters without warning. Still, it was a measure of how much the audience cared that the applause was uncertain - as if they did not want the play to have ended.
