Tusk Tusk, Royal Court, London

Well, the difficult second play syndrome has not proved a curse. Tusk Tusk is another fine, coruscating piece of work, with an equally disastrous maternal figure who has gone missing.

The title is an oblique reference to that favourite nursery song "Nellie the Elephant" who packed her bags and said goodbye to the circus. Her children have decided to fend for themselves on £200 in the new apartment, surrounded by packing cases, adopting a tribal lifestyle that has elements of Lord of the Flies and Where the Wild Things Are.

Again, Stenham reveals a natural talent sensibly dedicated to telling what she knows. Fifteen year-old Eliot and fourteen year-old Maggie – played, in remarkable stage debuts, by seventeen-year-old Toby Regbo and sixteen-year-old Bel Powley (whose sweet face you'll recognise from the recent TV Little Dorrit) – are holed up with their seven-year-old brother Finn (nine year-old Finn Bennett, no less than extraordinary). Finn, like Maurice Sendak's Max in Wild Things is always being sent to bed with his jungle fantasies, while Eliot is blowing the loot on alcohol and trying to impress a new girlfriend – Georgia Groome as Cassie.

Things turn a bit raw with Finn suffering a bad accident and the stage transformed by designer Robert Innes Hopkins into a birthday party environment that is invaded by well-meaning friends, Katie and Roland (Caroline Harker and Tom Beard).

Mum has been missing a week, so the situation has not yet spiralled out of control into the realms of implausibility, though Stenham is not too worried by that consideration in her conclusion. The point is she has found a tone both authentic and powerfully demotic for these mixed-up brats and devised a scenario that keeps the mawkish poetry intact. It's a big ask of the young actors to complete but they carry it off superbly.

To 2 May (020 7565 5000; www.royalcourttheatre.com)