First seen at the Bush Theatre in 1993, Jonathan Harvey’s Beautiful Thing is an incredibly funny yet poignant depiction of two teenage boys as they come to terms with their sexuality. As relevant today as it was when it premiered, directed by Nikolai Foster, Beautiful Thing is a brilliantly scripted, unforgettable coming-of-age story with a soundtrack to match.

15-year-old football-hating Jamie skives games to spend his afternoon with expelled pupil Leah on the landing walkway outside their south London flats. Neighbour Ste, trying to escape his abusive father, grows closer to Jamie, and the pair eventually reveal their feelings for one another, despite the social stigma they have to face. Beautiful Thing is perhaps not as shocking for audiences today as it was for those who lived when Clause 28 still was to be repealed, but the journey for gay equality is far from over, ensuring the play is still remarkable. Nevertheless the play’s focus does not necessarily seem to be on homosexuality, but instead tackles the ever-prevalent themes of domestic violence, complicated family relationships and the transition from childhood to adulthood.

At the forefront of the cast of five is Suranne Jones, best known for Coronation Street and more recently ITV drama Scott & Bailey, who does not disappoint. Her performance as Sandra, Jamie’s feisty yet supportive mother, is real and unforced, especially at moments of perfectly timed humour as she relishes her one-liners. But her most powerful scenes have to be those shared with Jamie, revealing her character’s deeper maternal instincts, culminating in Jamie coming out to his mum in a 1am heart-to-heart. Always believable, Jones conveyed Sandra’s ambition and love for her son subtly, and their relationship was consistently relatable and honest.

Oliver Farnworth successfully balanced pretentiousness with the real goodness of Tony, Sandra’s artist boyfriend, offering a refreshing and awkward comic relief throughout. Mama Cass fanatic Leah, played by Zaraah Abrahamas, cleverly delivers a strength and defiance without betraying a whiny immaturity that dims towards the end, perhaps showing a glimpse of what she has the ability to become.

However, the true stars of Beautiful Thing are up-and-coming actors Jake Davies and Dannyboy Hatchard as Jamie and Ste respectively. Hatchard’s initial distance and gruffness gave an impressive contrast to Davies’s heart-melting shyness; together they create a wonderful underlying sense of anticipation and hope as they talk deep into the night sharing a tiny single bed. With vulnerability and innocence, and a little Body Shop peppermint foot cream, the pair’s genuine relationship and onstage chemistry makes Beautiful Thing the charming success that it is.

Beautiful Thing is playing at the Arts Theatre until 25 May before touring to Liverpool, Leeds and Brighton. For more information and tickets, see the Beautiful Thing website.

The transfer of Bruntwood Prize-winning Three Birds by Janice Okoh from Manchester’s Royal Exchange to the city where its action is set only gives a sharper resonance to this sometimes chaotic but truly remarkable snapshot of three apparently abandoned siblings’ attempts to keep the real world out. Director Sarah Frankom’s assured production, bolstered by an excellent cast, delivers a dark encounter with human desperation somehow still brimming with comedy and love.

Like a Pitchfork Disney for the Primark/Beiber generation, fantasy and grim reality fight it out in the front room of a south London flat, its neutral décor throughout aesthetic barely disguising the near-poverty of its troubled inhabitants. It is crucial that designer Louie Whitemore’s frighteningly accurate set grounds the play’s extremities in a recognisable reality because there is certainly something strange going on in this household. Quick-fire exchanges between the squabbling siblings, half-fury but mostly love, are a joy to behold. Nevertheless, it’s clear that all’s not well here – something goes ominously unsaid, almost as if the characters can feel the eyes of audience upon them.

Fiercely protective but quietly disintegrating older sister Tiana (Michaela Coel) struggles to maintain the balance as outside agencies threaten to disrupt their odd equilibrium.Ten-year old Tanika (a truly astonishing performance from Susan Wokomo) is pacified with increasingly outlandish and heartbreaking promises about the eventual “real house”, whilst copious amounts of vodka and chicken must be sourced for the damaged Tionne’s (Jahvel Hall) undisclosed experiments. Perhaps because such laboured exposition would counteract the play’s accomplished naturalism, we spend much of the first half with very little concrete information about these characters. Yet despite some confusion as to ages, names and what on earth is going on, we find ourselves falling in love with these fragile, ill-fated but stubbornly optimistic individuals. The star of the show is undoubtedly Tanika, an aggressively precocious tween whose crush on her teacher reveals a desperation for motherly love. Selective-mute Tionne is a dark horse, switching between OCD- absorption with his ‘project’ and ecstatic moments of spontaneous joke-telling. In the play’s final moments he becomes the main purveyor of emotional devastation. In oldest sister Tiana the family finds its story-teller and makeshift mother, whose admirable commitment to the fictions she nearly believes in allows the family to transcend its dire situation. In a particularly absorbing performance, Cole imbues the often intimidating Tiana with an almost regal elegance – somehow making a farm break-in/chicken murder learnt from Youtube videos sound like a profoundly noble endeavour.

Meanwhile, climbing through the window is Dr Feelgood (the riveting Lee Oakes), the lanky, lairy drug-dealer with surprisingly honourable intentions. His twitchy mile-a-minute talk injects energy into the sometimes slackening pace whilst his acts of kindness provide a refreshing spin on a common stereotype. Another ingenious creation is the seeming saviour Miss Jenkins, played to poisonous perfection by Claire Brown. The object of Tanika’s affection is a cheery but interfering primary teacher whose techniques clearly fail her outside the classroom – a stark reminder of how, for these siblings, help only ever hinders. Overall, the dynamic force of these characters and the barrage of revelations towards the end, combined with a necessarily slow exposition, means it’s sometimes difficult to sustain all the emotions the action demands. Still, whilst the play could’ve been a quarter of an hour shorter, it almost seems worth it to spend more time with these troubled but loveable human beings.

It is not difficult to see why Janice Okoh is an award-winning playwright – her writing is at once subtle and vibrant, ricocheting between of-the-moment, raw, keenly-observed realism and searing moments of poetry. It is impressive that Okoh, Frankom and the cast manage to keep the poignant story of a family desperate to stay together at the heart of this melting-pot of social realism, in-yer-face ghastliness and surreal comic farce. Every time the three siblings sit together on the sofa, this simple image is a stab in the heart. “This is neglect!” declares Miss Jenkins when the extent of the sibling’s dysfunction is revealed and yet we, the audience, are somehow inclined to disagree. Even as everything collapses and horrifying truths come to light, we only become more painfully aware of the siblings’ fierce love for each other that fuels their futile attempt to remain a family in the face of disaster. Harrowing and hilarious, Three Birds is a grisly tale with a heart of gold, in which glorious writing is performed with the passion and precision it deserves.

Three Birds is playing at the Bush Theatre until 20 April. For more information and tickets, see the Bush Theatre website.

It’s not easy to describe or review immersive theatre pieces, such as this one currently being offered by StampCollective at the Theatre Delicatessen, Marylebone. Comparisons to previous works, such as Punchdrunk’s Masque of the Red Death, or more recently The Good Neighbour (both at Battersea Arts Centre – the home and hub, it seems, of immersive theatre), or the work by the fledgling Banner Theatre, based in Birmingham, are of little use, as one of the key points of immersive theatre is that it is just so, so different.

Moralgorithm is the deliberately ambiguous and clinical name of a dreary and Orwellian product-testing company. The 1984-esque setting is finely attuned, all the way down to the grey tiled carpeting and strip-lights. The audience, or new employees, are then split into teams and barked at by the general manager (Gaia Harvey-Jackson) into visiting different workstations. But change is afoot and the smell of revolt is in the air. Moralgorithm is experiencing its very own Arab Spring, or rather ‘Battenberg Rebellion’ (all will be explained once you’re there). We workers group together, aided by the more established members of staff, to overthrow the management and escape. And it’s exhausting stuff.

The level of detail that has gone into making this is very impressive indeed. With immersive theatre, you can only plan so far, and much has to be left to chance, or the whim of a particularly anarchic audience member. I was selected to assist with the uprising, and was tasked to find whistles to help equip my workers come the revolution. (Incidentally, I’d like to think I fulfilled this role with aplomb, bearing in mind I was asked if I was ‘a plant’ by another audience member at the end of the piece.) The whistles were scattered around the space, as were plenty of red herrings –  a set of keys, or some scribbled down notes – the depth of thought that has gone into this is quite remarkable.

Equally remarkable is the level of information about participants that is stored and fed into the marketing of future products; no throw-away quip is safe, everything said can, and quite possibly will, be used against you. As I said, quite Orwellian indeed.

After all was said and done, I caught up with and questioned StampCollective’s Ellie, who had ably played Moralgorithm’s supervisor and revolt instigator. She described her work as creating “real life imaginary playgrounds”. With revolt as a theme, was there a political undercurrent to the piece? “Yes”, she replied, “but what art doesn’t?”, before going on to stress that StampCollective’s work was political, but also, well, a little bit silly (hence the emphasis on Battenberg cake). I was interested to discover that Moralgorithm was just one piece of a jigsaw of a wholly created world, and that Stampcollective have performed interlinking works at the Bush Theatre, Southbank Centre and the Hackney Downs Studios. The potential therefore to get to know, and actively engage with, characters over a variety of spaces and settings is, I believe, a very exciting development for the future of theatre, and one that A Younger Theatre should keep an eye on.

Moralgorithm is the last performance at Theatre Delicatessen in Marylebone before it is turned into a block of flats. What further reason do you need therefore to catch something so different?

StampCollective’s Moralgorithm is running at Theatre Delicatessen until 23 March. For more information and tickets, see the Theatre Delicatessen website.

Staged in a bathroom, Jack Thorne’s recent Soho Theatre hit Mydidae is an intimate exploration of a young couple’s relationship on the anniversary of a shared personal tragedy. Commissioned by DryWrite as its first full-length play, it was produced at Soho in 2012 and now transfers to the Trafalgar Studios for a West End run. A week before the new run begins, Jack Thorne told Eleanor Turney more about the production and his experience of writing.

Tell me a bit about your background – how did you get into theatre?
Well, it’s not a particularly wonderful story! Boringly, I wanted to be a politician, then I wanted to be an actor. Then I went to uni and discovered that I didn’t like politicians and I didn’t have it in me to me an actor, so I decided I wanted to be a director. I couldn’t afford the rights to put on someone else’s play so I decided to write one, and then I discovered that I really liked the writing and not so much the directing bit at the end. I wrote a lot of plays and sent them off to a lot of people; eventually the Bush put one on and it’s gone from there.

How did you start writing professionally?
After that first play, I kept directing and quite enjoyed it, but I wasn’t especially good at it. I loved writing more than anything else and slowly that become what I did. I write for telly and film as well because I like working with other people. I really like collaborating and I like the whole process of putting on a show. I like making stuff with other people. Although I am quite shy and prefer my own company, really, I like what other people do when we collaborate and I think I’d miss that if I was just writing on my own.

Can you describe your writing and re-writing process? Do you like to be in the rehearsal room?
A script always changes in rehearsals, and when you’re working on a telly or film script, the amount of drafts you go through is extensive! You’ll always be changing things. But I’m not that keen on being in the rehearsal room – it’s a bit overwhelming. I love other people doing their thing but I don’t think I’m helpful in the rehearsal room. I’m there at the beginning, but I’m not really a rehearsal room writer. I’m picky about the directors I work with and they’re brilliant – much better than I would be! I’m always there if they want me, I just think that when I’d finished Mydidae, I knew who the characetrs were in my head; I knew them back to front and I don’t think that’s a helpful thing to take into a rehearsal room. The rehearsal room is about actors discovering who those characters are and the director helping them to do that. Having someone there who thinks that they know all the answers isn’t helpful! Having the writer there to ask “what did you mean by this bit?” isn’t that helpful, they need to work that out for themselves.

What advice would you give to young playwrights?
Keep trying, don’t give up. They might be lucky and be a Polly Stenham or an Anya Reiss, or it might take a bit longer. I wasn’t an overnight success, and I’m not sure that I’m truly successful yet myself. Keep plugging away. Also, find a person you trust who’ll read your stuff. It doesn’t have to be a theatre professional, it could just be a friend who gets what you want to do. You need someone on your side but who is interested in making you better, someone to force you to think about your work. But you also need someone to be there when you get rejected and to support you when everyone else is telling you that you’re rubbish. I still get far more rejections than acceptances. You have to be resilient, and having an ally is invaluable.

And what can audiences expect from Mydidae?
It’s changed a bit – not for the new venue, although that will shape matters in terms of direction – just in terms of things that weren’t quite right in the script that I can now fix! Theatre is a living breathing thing and it can change – that’s a brilliant thing. Having the opportunity to take a step back has been brilliant. Audiences can expect a couple of phenomenal performances – that might sound like someone flogging his stuff but I feel incredibly lucky with the performers we have in this show. I really think that young actors should come and see it, because these actors are just that good. What these two create on stage makes me very proud to be a part of it. It’s an intimate, natural play about the things that lure us into the dark. It’s a play about little things, but there’s a lot of little things, it’s pretty dark but also, I hope, hopeful.

Mydidae plays at Trafalgar Studios from 5 to 30 March. For tickets and more information, visit www.atgtickets.com/trafalgarstudios.

Image: Jack Thorne