The National Theatre's revival (although the word overstates the case) of the Austrian playwright Ferdinand Bruckner's Pains of Youth produces one of those evenings that sends your critic rushing to the text. He needs to check if, through his haze of boredom, he has understood the plot. He is also curious to discover if the play is as bad as it seemed in performance.

In this case, it isn't. I could see why it caused sensation (rather than stupor) when it was first performed in 1926. Here is a play about youth that could give an older generation coronaries. It takes a boarding house of female medical students in Vienna and gets them hooked on barbiturates, prostitution and promiscuity. It also features a first-class villain in Freder, a drunken layabout who incites the students' maid to steal from her mistress, "go on the game" (as Martin Crimp's patchy new translation puts it) and abet a suicide.

Yet all life is sucked out of the play by Katie Mitchell's startlingly inept direction and a clutch of lacklustre performances from her cast, led by the underpowered Geoffrey Streatfeild as Freder, who she seems to have persuaded to perform with the wooden formality of a world that has never heard of Chekhov or Ibsen. So affected are the performances, so unnatural is the rendering of the often colloquial dialogue, and so histrionic are the occasional explosions of hysteria, that you care not at all what happens to any of the students - not liver-damaged Freder, not posh, nihilistic Desiree, not ambitious, virginal Irene and certainly not their friend Marie, who of all the minnies is the most moaning. Death haunts the play. When Desiree says her generation must choose between bourgeois existence or suicide, one knows which she will plump for. But in this production, form follows content with deadly literalism. It may bore you to death.

All the cast (it would be invidious to single out any one for special blame) needs to do to bring this play alive is to portray the characters as real people. Play it like they do in This Life or a Mike Leigh film, but not as if you are jerking around a set of mannequins willed to you by posterity in the cause of anthropology. It might then become as sexy and as dangerous as Bruckner intended. The production's main novelty is its unusual approach to scene changes, handled by robotic men and women dressed in black, who aggressively whip polythene wrappings from the sets. The unfortunate effect is to make it seem as if they are removing dust covers from a museum piece.

Next to Pains of Youth, the RSC's restaging of Roy Williams's Days of Significance, currently on tour, may look like a masterpiece. Notwithstanding a rewrite that has beefed up the final act since its first outing two years ago, I can assure you it isn't. Williams does, however, have an ear for dialogue. The foul-mouthed squabbling of his group of working-class binge drinkers sounds plausible enough to make you rethink your walk home from the theatre. The gang is split up by the decision of two of the louts to sign up to the army for service in Iraq (apparently, once enlisted, you go straight there). One of two things, you can guess, are bound to happen. They will either be killed or commit an atrocity. Williams has them do both. Back in Blighty, their pals react by drinking even more and getting sentimental.

Williams seems to think that he has written a play about how Blair's wars have brutalised our youth. Its message is actually quite contrary. It suggests our cities' coarse street culture, in which every relationship is tainted by drink and sexual betrayal, has created a generation of men so degenerate that they are capable of killing civilian schoolchildren and stuffing broom-handles up prisoners' bottoms. In another age, for such a calumny on our boys, Williams and the RSC would have been prosecuted for treason. Joanna Horton as Hannah, whose act of betrayal is to go to college, makes the greatest impression in Maria Aberg's production. But punch-ups, penises and fake vomit are the real stars.

Pains of Youth
Cottesloe Theatre, London SE1

Days of Significance
Oxford Playhouse

Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times