Young blood

Spur of the Moment
Royal Court, until 21 August

The Beauty Queen of Leenane
Young Vic, until 21 August

Henry IV Part 2
Shakespeare’s Globe, until 3 October

It used to be policemen, now playwrights are getting younger too. Spur of the Moment is a debut work by Anya Reiss, who hasn’t left the sixth form yet. Her play takes us into a nice middle-class home where wars over money and sex are raging. Dad has blundered at work. An office fling has earned him the sack, left him in debt and turned his wife into a cauldron of jealousy. The family has taken in a lodger, Daniel, a wan and handsome 21-year-old student. Mum flirts aggressively with him, hoping to inflict some retaliatory scars on her faithless husband, but Daniel is taken by the couple’s gorgeous and precocious 12-year-old daughter, Delilah. She blurts out her love for him and he responds with an impetuous kiss which she mistakes for long-term commitment (she’s only 12, after all). She starts boasting mysteriously about ‘my boyfriend’. When Daniel’s girlfriend arrives the real sparks start to fly. The encounters between the rivals are laced with rich doses of girl-on-girl arsenic.

There is an amazing maturity about this debut. Reiss uses the age-of-consent taboo to create a compelling family drama which also neatly contrasts the rancid, mistrustful love of middle age with the rushed and excited fumblings of youth. Not everything is quite right. Towards the end the characters become a bit repetitive, and their emotional range might be broader. And the play’s closing moments seem a tad petty compared with the Wagnerian grandeurs that preceded them. That said, Reiss is a genuine discovery.

The character of Daniel, drawn in oblique and subtle shades, is her outstanding achievement. An emotional drifter who can’t make sense of his violent inclinations, Daniel is also, rather strangely but very convincingly, victimised by his dreamy good looks.