I love the way the Royal Court Young Writers Festival throws up anything and everything. This year's festival has already hit the nail with Bola Agbaje's eerily topical and funny debut play about identity and respect on the streets of a south London housing estate. Now it offers another astonishing talent in Alexandra Wood.
Agbaje's play is all spluttering heart - Wood's is all cool head. The Eleventh Capital offers a snapshot of life in a totalitarian regime where the relationship between the state and its people is based on fear. The red stars suggest communist China, the sense of paranoia the pre-Glasnost era in the eastern bloc, the determination to silence dissent and forcibly relocate huge numbers of the population hints at Burma's military junta. A new capital city is under construction, and the state is demanding that key workers relocate.
Wood's clever play takes the form of a series of brief two-handed exchanges that are like games of chess in which the rules keep changing. A woman and her neighbour test each other through their use of language; one civil servant manipulates another; personal relationships fall victim to power plays. There are times when you think Wood may have been reading too much Caryl Churchill, but if she has not quite found her own distinctive voice, she certainly has a distinctive grasp of structure and atmosphere and she captures a world where the good do not stand a chance.
· Until March 10. Box office: 020-7565 5000.
