This imaginative double bill began with The Listeners, performed by the Pegasus Youth Theatre Company. With a clever script by Mojisola Adebayo, it looks at the human need for someone to talk to, someone to listen. In the England of 2017 a massive earthquake has caused a nuclear explosion, tsunami and flood. One survivor, Magz, is trapped in his bedroom. It’s in an elevated scaffolding set designed by the Youth Production Company, and effectively used in both works.

Here Magz is in touch online with an unseen authority, and in his loneliness he orders a “listener”. To his surprise the listener tells him: “I am an embodied computer programme.” And, indeed, it’s jerky, robotic movement supports this claim.

The play, partly created by the young actors — with psychological input from The Samaritans, whose offices are opposite the Pegasus — makes many points about how people don’t listen properly to each other. There’s a cast of 12, and they take turns in playing each of the two main characters. It’s funny and often moving, and ends on a note of hope, when the useless listener is gone, and Magz’s mother finally sits with him to hear what he has to say.

After the interval came Stuck, performed by the Pegasus Youth Dance Company. This is another intense and well directed piece, with choreography by Allan Hutson. It examines the psychological conditions of agoraphobia and claustrophobia — fear of open spaces and fear of being closed in. Again, the young cast has contributed a lot to the work, through workshops in which they studied these conditions in depth, and examined how they might feel in such a situation.

The piece starts off happily, and then focuses on the anxieties, first of all of those suffering from agoraphobia. It’s hard to convey this, but the cast responded with a tense series of dances. Claustrophobia is easier to put over in theatrical terms, and the struggle of a dancer to escape from an enclosing circle of other dancers is very effective. Throughout the piece the performers are given the opportunity to give their own expression of the traumas involved.

Hutson’s moving and manoeuvering of 17 dancers on what’s a pretty small stage was also skilfully done. Hat’s off to a difficult subject bravely tackled! Between these two works there was a short piece which dancers from the Youth Company created in just a few days at a workshop with the visiting African influenced Tavaziva company. The dancers devised the piece together with Ellen Yilma and Katie Cambridge of Tavaziva. A strong work with an African feel and a violent end.These three pieces will be seen again as part of the Pegasus international Mesh season in July.