High-profile writers including Mark Ravenhill, Abi Morgan, Jack Thorne and Bryony Lavery have written plays for this year’s festival.

The search for identity pulses through New Connections 2008: for acceptance and survival in modern Britain, for racial equality in 1960s South Africa, by deception in magical allotments, during white-out in a snow blizzard, through parenting, through faith, or by comic mistakes of social networking.

It Snows, by Bryony Lavery & Frantic Assem, performed by Sandbach School, Cheshire
Burying Your Brother in the Pavement, by Jack Thorne, performed by RSAMD Youth Works, Glasgow

3 – 8 July Olivier, Lyttelton & Cottesloe Theatres

Mother: Don’t you ever get bored with yourself?
Little Girl: You’re mental.

I tucked this away in my mental file along with the drunk who got on my bus last year and said to the driver, “I have no money. Would you accept a poem?”

Precocious kids came to mind at the National Theatre last night. I bought tickets, I thought, to two experimental plays on the big Olivier stage, but the music booming before the curtain went up was Euro techno hip hop, and the mostly young audience started performing The Wave (as fans do at Wembley and the Super Bowl). I discovered that I was at a festival of youth theatre companies, finalists who won the right to strut their stuff at the National after competing in fifteen regional semi-finals. The temptation was to bolt for the outdoors, but the first play, It Snows, turned out to be a musical slash happening of jaw-dropping skill.

The slight text came straight out of Nickelodeon: on a grungy London street two outsiders, a boy dweeb and a girl dweeb, suffer at society’s hands. The boy is set upon by toughs who strip him naked, the mortification made worse because they are girl toughs. The girl sits pining at home, dreaming that someone will one day ask her to dance. Overhead a second, weird couple play alter ego to the stranded pair down below until one of them, the brother, is hauled off in a strait-jacket. But when a sudden snow descends, everything changes – toughs revert to being kids, a snow man is made, a beloved Paddington bear gets buried in a snow drift and rescued again. Such is the magic when “it snows” that our forlorn dweebs meet, share a text-message kiss, and dance away with each other.

As a plot, this is treacle ladled over twee, but the cast’s exuberant singing and dancing made the show, only marginally the words. What touched me was the outbreak of innocence from a generation I assumed was past cynicism. Not for these kids, all drawn from a school in Cheshire, the desperation of the movie Fame and its break-a-leg frenzy. They were fifth and sixth formers showing off the genetic theatricality that comes so naturally to the English, a race that loves to play dress-up (just peek inside Prince Charles’s closet). The Cheshire group out-glowed the next troupe, from Scotland, whose sets and props were thrown together from cardboard and Scotch tape. 

Their play, Burying Your Brother in the Pavement, was a serious drama by Jack Thomas, a writer with credentials on the BBC. The plot sounds deadly in synopsis: a young boy has lost his older brother to street violence – he was slashed in the neck with a broken bottle and died on the sidewalk of a dingy, crime-ridden council estate. The younger brother runs away from home on the day of the funeral to camp out where the murder occurred and soon hatches the idea that he should bury his brother under the pavement where he died. The play’s title is literal, the act symbolic. The kids in the audience don’t see what’s coming, although most adults would. The sainted older brother had sneaked off to the seedy estate because he was secretly gay and had a crush on a poor boy there. I set my jaw for a PC parable about tolerance. The second twist was that the death wasn’t a street crime but suicide born of shame. As the ghost of the dead brother says, “I felt crushed, so I crushed myself.”

There was a bunch of juvenile filler in between these two shockers, and the thrust toward tolerance was deserved and touching. But the great thing about Burying Your Brother in the Pavement was the sensational lead performance by Tom, the fourteen-year-old younger brother. He appears squatting with a flashlight in a dark attic before he runs away, talking to us about his situation – talk that employs wit, irony, pathos, and self-knowledge -- and then never stops talking for ninety minutes. This unnamed Scottish actor held the Olivier stage by himself as if to the manner born, and when he embraced the bloody corpse of his murdered brother at the end, you felt, achingly, that a long day’s journey into night was reaching its shattering conclusion. 

Trooping out I saw girls leaning on boys in the lobby, and girls without boys pretending not to notice. What potential lies in any one of them? It would be a sentimental illusion for me to pretend to know. But Oscar Wilde must be wrong: Youth is by no means wasted on the young.