We've had a decade of in-yer-face, blood-and-sperm drama. But, intriguingly, these two tantalising new pieces in the Royal Court's young playwrights season both have middle-class settings and greet apocalypse and disaster with wry humour. Are we into a new era of comic despair?
Clare Pollard's The Weather puts me in mind of Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, in that a family disintegrates against a background of social anarchy. In the outside world the economy collapses, bombs explode in shopping malls and the weather is unpredictably violent.
Meanwhile, in one particular domestic kitchen, an angry daughter confronts her manic mum and harassed dad as poltergeists send toasters whizzing through the air and scrawl obscenities on the walls.
Pollard's point seems to be that the nuclear family is doomed and curiously oblivious to external chaos - so nothing very new there then. But, as a published poet, Pollard has a good ear for language and, as an aspiring dramatist, she wittily exploits the possibilities of theatre. Not since Blithe Spirit have we seen a play in which domestic objects acquire such dynamic life.
My only reservation about Ramin Gray's production is that it is too feverish from the start and, in particular, gives Helen Schlesinger as the loopy lush of a mum too much rope: the play would be even sharper if disaster sprang from recognisable normality.
Oddly enough, Gray gets the tone precisely right in Robin French's Bear Hug: a very funny NF Simpson-like shortie about a middle-class mum and dad greeting their son's transformation into a bear with persevering optimism. Jonathan Coy exudes superb sobriety as the father who, speaking of his ursine son's driving, acknowledges that "his hill starts are all over the place". And Helen Schlesinger treats the fact that the bear has savaged her hands and reduced them to bleeding stumps as a minor inconvenience. "I agree, it is wayward," says her husband.
What makes the play so refreshing, however, is not just its savage humour but its suggestion that youthful alienation, even at its most extreme, is often greeted with dogged parental hope.
· Until Saturday (Bear Hug)/ October 30 (The Weather). Box office: 020-7565 5000.
