If you’ve ever spent a night staying sober while all those around you are getting merrily hammered, you might know how I felt watching this play. Everyone’s having a good time, the energy’s high, the laughter won’t stop – and yet, you aren’t, you know, quite with it. Since watching a group of people get increasingly drunk is what most of The Acid Test is about, in one sense director Check Warner and her team have done very well. Even so…

I should start by saying the show is very funny, and that most people seemed to enjoy it more than I did. I just couldn’t quite love the play. It was premiered earlier this year at the ever adventurous Royal Court, and it definitely feels very contemporary. So contemporary it was written by someone a year younger than me. I try to speak up in favour of student-written drama whenever I can, but I don’t feel this qualifies, partly because it’s had a professional outing and partly because I am seething with suppressed jealousy, and perhaps a little too much familiarity. 19 year old Anya Reiss is doubtless a very good playwright, but she writes about what she knows, and that seems to me to be a problem.

This play features 3 early-20s female flatmates living in a kind of familiar, studenty, raspberry-vodka fuelled squalor. Dana (Brid Arnstein) is considering sleeping with her boss, Ruth (Hannah Phillips) is whining about the possible end of her on-off relationship with a green-haired hipster, and Jess (Sophie Crawford) has just brought her dad (Quentin Beroud) into the flat for the night after his ejection from her mum’s house. As the night wears on, they listen to dubstep, drink a lot of alcohol and get high.

And to be honest, I just couldn’t see past my natural left-wing prejudices: I saw them as a bunch of bourgeois post-adolescents wallowing in self pity, intoxicants and comfy DFS sofas. I was very glad that by the end of the play, Beroud’s terminally uncool father had finally let rip and called their petty problems what they were: small dramas invented for the sake of feeling significant. And this is probably a good comment on today’s youth, in some way, but it made me think: is that all we have to write about today? Small dramas? Obsessing over still being a virgin or whether you sleep with too many people? One of the nicest touches in the script was a demonstration of how easy it is to impress people with an improvised profundity about chopsticks, which struck home precisely because the characters see too much significance in everything.

I just couldn’t bring myself to like these people. Not even Crawford’s wonderfully grumpy Jess, who seemed the realest of the lot, could escape appearing petulant and mean. The acting, while all good, was also, well, fairly easy to do well. These were students playing students, mimicking modern speech patterns and saying “fuck” a lot. Again, this is pointed out by the father character, but even in a self aware way, the swearing is not endearing. I say this as a massive fan of the swearing on The Thick of It, because it has rhythms and cadence and creative force. In this play, swearing was just punctuation, like in real life. And for whatever reason, it just didn’t work for me.

I was also niggled, although it seems a sour point, by the obvious fact that Beroud, while a great actor, is just clearly the same age as the girls he’s meant to be older than by 30 years. While he does do a lovely pathetic drunken dance, and has excellent comic timing, he just can’t convince as a real dad, probably through no fault of his own. Phillips and Arnstein are also both funny, but again, too familiar to really impress.

All that said, it is a fun night out, and most importantly it is great to see a female-led comedy in a term when most comedies – Speed the Plow, Lonesome West, Art – drip with testosterone. I would like to give this four stars, but unfortunately, something about the play itself left me cold. My suggestion? Bring booze and match the characters drink for drink. It feels like that’s how it was meant to be enjoyed.