Kangaroo Valley

Bristol Old Vic

Four stars

It's one of the great challenges of today's theatre: how to attract a young audience with no tradition of - and little interest in - theatre-going. And the answer may well be Toby Farrow. At the age of 27, this playwright is writing for his peers, which gives him a headstart in getting a handle on their tastes. More to the point, he doesn't try to be 'contemporary' in that awfully transparent and patronising way. Instead, he is the Evelyn Waugh of the slacker generation, writing accessible contemporary plays which blend whipcrack dialogue and surreal comedy with astringent nihilism.

Set in a backpackers hostel in Earl's Court where shattered dreams crunch underfoot, Farrow's new play Kangaroo Valley describes the decline and fall of Jez (William Bowy), aspiring South African Olympic swimmer who drops into London and drops out of his life under the tutelage of ageing Aussie backpacking veteran Norman (Stuart Crossman). Added into the mix are Tica (Chloe Summerskill), an embittered pole-dancer from Adelaide, and Chad (Nicholas Gadd), a hapless Antipodean no-hoper who serves as the hostel dogsbody. Kangaroo Valley is a play about escape, whether it's Tica seeking a compass to lead her away from her pole, Chad with his jargon-laden dreams of winning a skateboarding championship, or Jez trying to flee the rigours of the sportsman's schedule in the oblivion of London's global melting pot. But above all, it's a play about Norman, a man who has already escaped from real life into the peripatetic dirt and squalor lifestyle of the independent traveller. A roaring bully, he sucks Jez down into his atavistic morass of drugs, bar work and dirty Y-fronts, whilst Chad and Tica bob helpless in his wake, trapped in a dead-end lifestyle thousands of miles from home.

Yet Farrow does not present Norman as a purely 'bad' character. He balances somewhere on a line between Mephistopheles and Prometheus, leaving the onlooker unsure whether he should be condemned for tempting Jez into destruction or praised for offering him his only chance to escape the bondage of constant training under the paternal whip. Crossman's performance is an astounding eruption of unbridled energy, which succeeds in making Norman both incredibly loveable and completely loathsome at the same time. This ambiguity in his depiction lends a sense of gritty verisimilitude to the character: he may be larger than life, but Norman is no cartoon. The same goes for the other characters: although less multidimensional, they all have depths which lift them away from being merely comic devices.

Kangaroo Valley is both incredibly funny and horrifically bleak. If nothing else, it will emphatically tear up any romantic notions that one might have about the nobility and freedom of the backpacker life. Taken together with Farrow's previous work, it firmly establishes him as a master of the 21^st century tragicomedy. More importantly, it is the perfect play to capture the imagination of a generation whose natural domain is the multiplex and the widescreen TV, not the theatre.

Toby O'Connor Morse

At Bristol Old Vic until 28 February (0117 987 7877)

At Southwark Playhouse 24 March to 10 April (020 7620 3494)