This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Sexual and political tensions on college campuses are a rich seam of plot material, from the novelist David Lodge’s droll 1980s send-ups through to David Mamet’s Oleanna. A new era of stand-offs over consent, culture wars and the wavy borderline between overdue “Me Too” reckonings and a culture of hysteria whose flames of accusation burn bright all offer theatre an ethical maze for a rising generation to navigate.

Alma Mater at London’s Almeida, by the Australian playwright Kendall Feaver, is relevant to current debates about how a generally benign set of students, teachers and parents can end up at mutually destructive cross-purposes — with the emphasis on the cross, as reputations implode and authority is inverted.

The setting feels like an Oxbridge college, by virtue of references to age, chapels and male-only traditions, but the story could be set anywhere in tetchy, fragile academia where generations leave their mark in daring rituals — “the chapel is used mainly for sex these days” — and abrupt changes of mores.

The catalyst is Paige, a fresher (played here with a mix of naïveté and Welsh steel by Liv Hill), who has sex with an older student on her first night at the kind of freshers’ welcome do that every parent has nightmares about: the theme is “What were you wearing when the police raided the brothel?”

Afterwards, she havers about whether to accuse her fellow student of rape — or upbraid herself for her lapse. For Nikki (Phoebe Campbell), the college’s ambitious and self-righteous welfare officer, there is no doubt that her new protégée’s experience is part of a “rape culture” of machismo which facilitates a sex crime.

Is she right? The evidence is mixed. Stupid obscene letters are aimed at new female students, and there’s a game in which students look up profiles of newcomers as prospective dates (shades of the fictionalised Facebook origin tale at Harvard in The Social Network movie).

It’s all a mighty headache for Jo, the first female master, who has taken the gig at her alma mater in the hope of dusting it down, after a career as a journalist in war zones, only to find herself in the university equivalent without a flak jacket.

Justine Mitchell, a stalwart of the Dublin stage, steps gamely into this role after Lia Williams pulled out due to illness. In her flintiness and tendency to bulldoze contrary opinion, Williams might have fitted the imperious part better, though Mitchell brings her own warmth and spontaneity to a character by turns admirable and astringent.

The charge against her is that, to defend the institution, she lacks empathy. But she is also wary of Nikki’s zealous pursuit of justice on behalf of someone who seems reluctant to be defined by trauma.

The result is a talkative play — Nikki and Jo are well-matched in being reluctant to shut up and listen to any point of view beyond their own. Also thrown in there’s an overdone echoing conflict between Nikki and her mentor and old flame, a poetry prof whose romantic yearnings tread a narrow line between engaging and creepy.

Polly Findlay’s gladiatorial staging and Vicki Mortimer’s vaulted set remind us that it is the physically enclosed spaces of academia — from chapels to quads and halls — that intensify the mood of conflict. Crucially, there is enough dedication to making different viewpoints ring true to avoid the whole thing teetering into preachy Woke didacticism.

When the accused student’s feisty mother shows up, the perspective shifts as she asks pointed questions about the culture of the college: “This didn’t happen under my roof. it happened under yours.”

We never meet the boy himself, other than to hear that he is afraid but possibly not remorseful. Yet we are initiated into a sniggering culture of over-sexualised rituals and online ogling of “fresh meat” which sets the sordid plot in motion.

It’s an over-packed plot. Feaver likes to unsettle us about whether the rights and wrongs are really about sex, race, generational hierarchies or the changeable nature of student–teacher relationships.

The whirlwind of social media both catalyses and amplifies arguments about guilt and responsibility, turning a college squall into a venting of past grievances by women far beyond its walls.

Watching the scandals of the Ivy League and the “Everyone’s Invited” gut-spilling of exploitative behaviour in public schools a couple of years ago, it’s hard not to conclude that elite intellectual institutions are pretty hopeless when their own dirty linen gets aired. Flaws and all, Alma Mater is a deft contribution to intergenerational stand-offs. Take your most woke young relative along, and you’ll be fighting about it all the way home.

Before we reconvene for the new theatre term, there’s a good range of new stuff for the long vac to graze on. There is Simon McBurney’s reworking of Mnemonic, his dazzling memory twister from the 1990s at the National.

Dominic West stars in Arthur Miller’s story of everyday dysfunctional Brooklyn folk in A View from the Bridge, and more than 40 years after her debut in Guys and Dolls, the tireless Imelda Staunton kicks up the stardust in Hello Dolly! at the Palladium. A more than decent summer spread, all things considered.