Foot/Mouth ** and Eye/Balls *** TNT

Friday 28 August 2009 16:13 GMT

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Foot/Mouth and Eye/Balls

This article was first published on tntonline.co.uk on Friday 28 August 2009 16:13 GMT.

For more than fifty years, the National Youth Theatre has given aspiring actors and backstage technicians the chance to show what they can do. You may not spot a future Helen Mirren or Daniel Craig (both NYT alumni), but what you’re guaranteed is commitment, enthusiasm and, hopefully, a display of real talent.

This summer, the “Six Pack at Soho” season focuses on various bits of the body, with a pair of new short plays being performed each night.

John Nicholson and Steven Canny of Peepolykus (say it slowly) have contributed two linked but stylistically different comedies with a gruesome twist. Foot takes us into an unconvincing future in which the Celtic state of Cornwall is at odds with England and mysterious stray feet keep on washing up on its shores. In Mouth, the English have become compulsory speakers of gobbledygook under a harsh authoritarian regime, and the focus shifts to the captured siblings of Sarah (Jo Rayner), the Cornish teenager who found one of the severed appendages. Some – but far from all - of the jokes work, but the distancing lack of characterisation means it’s hard to care what happens in this mildly amusing enterprise.

Sarah Solemani’s Eye concerns itself primarily with the exploitation of young women. Single mother Diana wins a place to study Art History at a Dublin college (so long as she can provide evidence of her ability to fund her studies) and takes up residence with a male tutor with dubious intentions and the two other promising female students already in situ. The script lacks focus, but motor-mouthed, would-be dress-designer Cute certainly lives up to her name.

Far better is Solemani’s Balls which follows a gang of office equipment salesmen on a stag do trip to Dublin, where, inevitably, their paths cross with Diana’s. Just as in Tits/Teeth (which completes the season) director Gbolahan Obisesan production falls into the trap of pandering to the very exploitation it aims to criticise, with Carly-Jane Hutchinson’s game Diana called upon to gyrate far too explicitly and for far too long. But the dialogue here is much snappier, with some great comic lines delivered with professional panache by Lauren O’Rourke’s bride-to-be Tess who won’t let her man out of her sight.

Soho Theatre, Dean St, W1D 3NE (020 7478 0100). Tube: Tottenham Court Road. Until Sep 10/8. £15-£20.