Punk Rock

A 17-year-old boy sitting beside me watching Sarah Frankcom's returning production of this much-admired Simon Stephens drama declared it 'easily the best play I've seen in my life', and swore to its authenticity. Good reason to feel both elated at Stephens's acute theatrical ear, and alarmed at the intense pressures that the young man found so worryingly recognisable. The piece is gripping, shocking and ferociously funny as anxieties jitter, hormones fizz and misery festers in the library of a Stockport private school.

The brightest kid - misfit Chadwick Meade, played with quiet potency by Mike Noble - is on a scholarship, but most of the pupils are monied. That doesn't mean the confidence they flaunt is real, though; and with A-grades, body image and sexuality just some of their worries it seems almost inevitable that somebody is going to come unglued. When it happens, it's horrifying.

Yet Stephens's writing, despite outbreaks of speechifying, never sensationalises. On the contrary, there's something disturbingly offhand about the ordinariness of these teenagers' dangerous confusion, with no sign of adult intervention to point the way. Frankcom's production is scorchingly acted, particularly by Laura Pyper as the smart-mouthed, self-harming new girl, and Rupert Simonian as the instantly smitten William. Frighteningly good.