YORK Youth Theatre's new director, Owen Calvert-Lyons, was not wrong when he said: "As ever with Edward's Bond work, nothing is handed to you on a plate."

Not until the closing moments could Thursday's first-night audience make sense of The Children, a weird tale of growing up in brutal circumstances, written expressly for young performers by the ever-radical London playwright.

Youth theatre should push at the boundaries, in subject matter and performance technique, and Bond demands that the young performers dive in at the deep end, giving them language where meaning seems tantalisingly out of reach.

This is particularly so in the relationship of teenage Jo (Lucy May Orange) and her snappy, strange-behaving mother (Lucy Skilbeck), whose conversations are always fractured. Introvert, frustrated Jo bashes her puppet with a brick; later a vengeful tramp figure (John Holt-Roberts) bumps off Jo's friends one by one with the same murderous technique. I feel uncomfortable that this macabre morass of a play passes as suitable for youth theatre, but more because it is wilfully oblique until the redemptive finale.

By comparison, director of education Jill Adamson's troupe in Claire Dowie's brace of short plays, Bonfire Nights and Allotments, is almost brazenly confident, more of an ensemble too. Granted, the dialogue is easier, and humorous to boot, but young actors stand a far better chance with such bracing material. Again, death looms large in Bonfire Nights, where a girl uses the cover of Bonfire Night to commit multiple murders, but Adamson's adaptation adds to the already absurdist humour by turning Dowie's monologue into a play for a cast of 18, with boys and girls in androgynous dresses to portray different facets of the gun-fixated girl.

The Allotments, a chance for children to play perky pensioners, unearths a comic talent of the future in James Swanton. Watch him blossom. It's all in the voice.

This evening's double bill will be Mr Puntila And His Man Matti at 7.15pm; The Children, 8.30pm.

York Youth Theatre, Double Bills, The Studio, York Theatre Royal; tonight's brace starts at 7.15pm. Box office: 01904 623568.