Four Play ★★★/Meat ★★★★Weston Studio

Week one of the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School summer festival feels a bit like opening the door to a house party at 2am: exciting, messy, full of people trying to work out who they are in real time. It’s one of the pleasures of these graduating productions; not just catching actors before the industry gets its claws into them, but seeing contemporary writing thrown into the hands of performers willing to go at it with frightening commitment. This opening week pairs two plays obsessed with intimacy, but from opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. Jake Brunger’s Four Play smooths its anxieties over with wit and expensive wine energy; Gillian Greer’s Meat rips the tablecloth clean off and smears the dinner across the walls. Jake Brunger’s Four Play is clearly beloved on this directing cycle — this is the third version I’ve seen — a catnip for drama schools. Funny, contemporary, deceptively slippery, it takes queer relationships and polyamory and examines them under the bright whit…