International Connections, National Theatre, Cottesloe, London

A National disaster

An event called InterNational Connections that begins with groups from Northern Ireland and Leeds? Odd, but not as strange as reading that "worldclass writers" were commissioned to come up with its plays for young actors, and then seeing the opening works by Andy Hamilton and Tamsin Oglesby.

Both plays are banal, patronising, and full of lines and devices any new playwright should be told to avoid. Oglesby's Olive, for example, a mishmash of fairy tale and social comment, had a heroine who frequently knelt to pray, saying "Dear God, I know I don't believe in you, but...''. Sixteen years after abandoning her at birth, Olive's father takes her to a foreign country, where he reviles her language and religion, makes her eat ratatouille two nights running, and, fed up with her back talk, cuts off her hands. But Olive's sweetness is not affected, and she and the rich, young Oliver fall in love. His possessive mother, a sort of Mayfair madam on speed, plots to kill Olive, but a wood sprite saves her and gives her a new pair of hands. Sarah Young, of North Down Youth Drama, made a heartfelt Olive, and Nikki McGarry an amusingly haughty mother. Best was Jonathan Reynolds's tender and sincere Oliver – he keeps a commendably straight face when he has to say, "Olive, I don't believe your heart is made of stone."

Hamilton, the writer of Drop the Dead Donkey, contributes a play that also ventures into the supernatural, in the form of a ghostly father who is as ineffectual as when he was alive. Otherwise, The Exam is a limp, conventional comedy in which two boys and a girl sit for long stretches of silence and awkward chat outside a classroom, the clownish boy filling the time by, among other things, trying to touch his nose with his tongue. Their parents, of three classes, make them nervous with pressure, praise and indifference. The dialogue is childish sitcom stuff ("You dyslexic?" "No, just thick as pig shit"), and the pandering to social stereotype, adolescent rebellion and parental worries is equally vulgar. No one shines in this production, from St Mary's Youth Theatre.

As charmless as his play, Hamilton, when called to the stage, gratuitously insulted one of the presenters. Everyone involved, though, was insulted by the choice of radio comic Jonathan Coleman, whose crass and sour comments must have made the young people wonder why he had been chosen to represent the Royal National Theatre. As, of course, did I.