THERE is never anything for young people to do, is there?

Youth theatre is a chance for expression, bonding, acquiring confidence and learning respect and self respect. Old-fashioned principles maybe, but it also happens to be good fun, and you won't find two plays better fun than last night's brace of new works by Bryony Lavery and Patrick Marber. Fun, and frankly not a little mad.

Yesterday was the launch of the Yorkshire regional showcase of NT Shell Connections, a nationwide celebration of youth theatre that involves 250 youth theatre groups and schools performing hour-long new works by ten prominent British playwrights.

York Theatre Royal is hosting a northern showcase for the first time in The Studio, where there will be 20 performances by 16 groups over ten nights with two shows per night. In the best bargain in York this fortnight, a festival voucher for access to all the performances costs £10.

Following stirring introductory speeches by Theatre Royal artistic director Damian Cruden and teenage York actress Hannah Draper, host company York Youth Theatre opened the festival with Bryony Lavery's "deliberately difficult" Discontented Winter/House Remix.

The "Discontented Winter" part is a reference to Lavery's "youth-issue play" being an update of Shakespeare's Richard III set five minutes in the future: a future being viewed from afar by Star Trek anorak Cheviot (Hannah Draper again).

The latterday Richard is hoodlum Ronan (flame-haired, hot-wired Matt Palfrey), who vows to bring down the government and kidnap two young princes, heir Ed (the vainglorious Jono Alderson) and airhead Hal (David Orme in a nice but dim turn). Cheviot, teenage Sloanie Serena (Charlotte Bennett) and teenage whore Slapper (Anna Siobhan-Wilcox) all seek to change the path of history in Lavery's episodic, anti-Royalist study of British social status.

The "House Remix" is Lavery's invitation to director Sarah Brigham and her cast to "pause/hold/fast forward the play with their finger on the remote". This gave them the chance to play around with the rhythm and flow of theatre, in the manner of a Tarantino film, editing the piece at the sound mixing desk like a DJ, while everyone fought for control of the ultimate weapon of mass distraction - the television and DVD remote - as the world descended into a Bollywood musical farce.

If Discontented Winter was as nuts as The Prisoner or early Dr Who, Hemsworth Arts and Community College, Pontefract, had a whale of a time too with Marber's The Musicians, in which a hapless youth orchestra's human spirit triumphs over adversity with the aid of a Russian cleaner (the outstanding Ashley Glover) and his belief in the power of The Who's Pinball Wizard.

Do connect with Connections, a drama festival with an invigorating future.

Updated: 09:45 Wednesday, April 28, 2004