In the year or so since the Royal Shakespeare Company opened the latest incarnation of its Other Place address as a centre for new work and new ideas, it has yet to establish the kind of identity that so marked out its original 1970s version. However, matters are beginning to coalesce under the supervision of RSC deputy artistic director Erica Whyman, with the periodic Mischief mini-festivals serving so far as flagship events. The latest Mischief includes talks, work-in-progress showings and, front and centre, a double-bill of one-act plays which stimulate and provoke.

Tom Morton-Smith follows up his 2014 RSC success Oppenheimer with another “science” piece, The Earthworks. A journalist and a physicist share an eventful night in a Geneva hotel before the opening of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. As with his earlier bioplay, Morton-Smith blends accessible scientific explanation with sensitive human insight; Clare may be trying to exploit Fritjof for material that she hopes will take her press article beyond mere churnalism, but each shares a part of themselves that in the end reduces all the extreme physics to secondary importance. Indeed, science fact blends with science fiction, as Fritjof’s account of his own bereavement is driven by a trope that originated in Bob Shaw’s 1960s short story Light Of Other Days.

Rebecca Humphries, who appears in The Earthworks as an officious hotel manager, takes the central role in Myth, co-written by Matt Hartley from an idea by Kirsty Housley (who also directs), with Lena Kaur and Thomas Magnussen switching from hack and boffin to an irritating, self-satisfied couple invited to dinner due to a Facebook misunderstanding. What at first seems simply an account of social and personal awkwardness is then replayed in condensed form, but things begin to go wrong. At first Humphries and Fehinti Balogun as her boyfriend seem to be corpsing at unplanned errors, but matters grow more serious and distasteful. By the third run-through, the only lines left are the handful which now express worry at an eco-disaster that is not imminent but current; the pleasantries of conspicuous consumption, argue Housley and Hartley, can only help us to ignore this catastrophe for so long. One hopes the RSC continues to offer more such Other work.

Written for the Financial Times.