It is perhaps a sign of the times that the Double Feature – a Depression-era money-making scheme – has found itself on London’s South Bank. Indeed, the National Theatre’s decision to stage two plays back-to-back in ITS scenery warehouse the Paintframe, has a thoroughly thrifty feel about it. From the double-bill of new plays by emerging playwrights and an ensemble artistic team right down to the MDF seating, it is a million miles away from what you expect at the National and that just makes it all the more interesting.

Sam Holcroft’s plays are bleak affairs, and in Edgar and Annabel it soon becomes clear that beneath the thin veneer of domesticity there lurks something much more sinister. Holcroft creates a world indistinguishable from our own, with the petty bickering of Trystan Gravelle and Kirsty Bushell’s well-to-do couple, and the pretensions of their thoroughly middle class dinner party, reminiscent of scenes playing out in kitchens far and wide. Yet Holcroft injects this entirely believable situation with just enough tyranny, fear and inhumanity to turn familiarity into discomfort.

Edgar and Annabel is a deliberately ambiguous play in both style and content, and having called into question who we can trust, it benefits from never giving away any answers. Through the ambiguity we are presented with questions about our own society and Lyndsey Turner’s direction masterfully builds tension, so that you start to question whether a helicopter overhead is an ominous development in the action or merely an incidental intrusion by the outside world. Most impressively, despite the funniest sing-off you will ever have the joy to witness, you still emerge shaken – a feeling you learn to expect from Holcroft’s work.

Despite sharing the bill with a window into dystopia, DC Moore’s The Swan frankly couldn’t be more different. In that scuzzy pub we all know too well, where regulars lurk day and night, and pork scratchings are considered haute cuisine, Jim awaits the mourners from a local funeral. The play unfolds like a soap opera, with home truths and heartaches laid bear for all to see and family tensions brought to the fore. The sordid details of their lives make for deliciously grim viewing, and while the text lacks a punch, the performances are particularly strong. Trevor Cooper lets rip with Jim’s exotic vernacular, while Claire-Louise Cooper feels instantly like an old (if not at all desirable) acquaintance to this particular Essex girl.

Although the performance space is integral to the evening, the staging for the two plays still felt somewhat limited (an inevitable result of their transfer from the previously intended Cottesloe Theatre perhaps). The box set from which the protagonists broke out in Edgar and Annabel captured the starkness of the play but could have worked anywhere, while the traverse staging playing host to the pub in The Swan was accurate but failed to make you feel part of the action. It ultimately felt that the sets didn’t quite live up to the potential of the space or concept – a statement as bold as the latter deserved a little more bravery from the former.

Much of the attraction of Double Feature is the NT’s imaginative use of a new space; and from the makeshift, industrial foyer to the discarded paint pots, it is a source of constant curiosity to explore a side of the theatre previously seen by a limited few. The transformation of the space for the two pieces is even treated as part of the night’s entertainment, and all-in-all the concept and the plays are highly successful.

Double Feature in the Paintframe at the National Theatre runs until 10th September. You can read a review of Double Feature 2 here.