In its fifth year of promoting new writing at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Northern Exposure is presenting three full-scale productions for the first time.

This is an admirable policy but it also leaves new plays at risk of being rudely exposed in the harshest glare before being ready for such critical judgement.

David Hermanstein's second play, Safe, is one such work. Developed in a writing lab run by black company Eclipse Theatre, in its new 70-minute form it still has the rough edges of a nascent drama better suited to a workshop performance, where faults in dialogue, clarity of plot and character and shortfalls in theatrical presentation could be ironed out.

You may say that to deny this play its chance is to play safe when it is already too hard for new voices to gain their big break, but I say better sorry than Safe on this occasion.

As episodic and sensationalist as a TV soap, Safe depicts the gang warfare, male bravado and gun culture that already fill far too many clichéd portraits of disaffected black youth in urban Britain. Like the film Bullet Boy, it has a moral core to its portrait of black-on-black violence, and its unique selling point is Hermanstein's desire to explore "what happens to the people who get left behind in the undertow". What a shame, then, that it is so difficult to fathom what's going on in his overlapping stories of guns, drugs, feckless fathers and nappy changes, presented in street patois that is too often incomprehensible.

This much is clear. Dionne (Akiya Henry) is a single mum, consigned to a psychiatric ward after her boyfriend Delroy (Marcus Onilude) is gunned down in a drug war. Her brother Remi (Jumayn Hunter) must switch from GCSE studies to bringing up her baby, a task that has him adding marijuana to the milk feed. Their father is absent, playing chess and hissing platitudes in prison.

Beyond that, everything else in Karena Johnson's production is shrouded in a fog brought on by Hermanstein's wish to play around with time, ambiguity and tone.

Unfortunately, he is yet to master his new toys and you are left with too much to work out.

Safe, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until June 9.

Box office: 0113 213 7700.