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Save for a handful of chairs, the stage is empty. Six people stand facing the audience, talking in pairs about Harry Potter, Britney Spears and various other facets of pop culture. But then the conversation turns dark.
'What do you want to talk about?' asks one.
'Murder,' comes the reply.
We're witnessing the goings-on in an online chatroom. A few minutes later we are taken into another - this time for teenagers contemplating suicide, and what follows is a shocking but also  darkly comic journey through the minds of a handful of young people.
Chatroom, written by Irish playwright Enda  Walsh, is part of a double bill of plays dealing with teenage experiences staged at the National Theatre in London.
The other is Mark Ravenhill's Citizenship, about a teenage boy coming to terms with his sexuality at school. Both are coming to  the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts  this month.
In a pivotal scene in Chatroom,  what begins as  lighthearted banter between two boys and two girls changes as 15-year-old Jim enters the chatroom. Jim is suicidal but two of the characters take it on themselves to cajole  him into going through with his deadly obsession. It's a chilling tale of teenage manipulation and a window onto a tragic world we rarely glimpse.
Walsh  says the inspiration for the play was upper middle-class teenagers.  'The west London suburb where the play is set is a culture-less hinterland. And, unfortunately, these people are the future of Britain ... miniature adults debating nothing in particular,' he says, adding that originally the play was performed in classrooms.
'All my plays tend to be about people opinionating and trying to find themselves in quite hostile worlds. I had read about a bizarre case in Leeds, in the north of England, where this kid tried to orchestrate his own murder in McDonald's.
'The suicide rate in Ireland for young men is really high so I thought I'd write about this topic. But it's also open to comedy, and as a result, this piece is very dark and playful.'
The pairing of Chatroom with Ravenhill's Citizenship works  well: both deal with the complex lives of teenagers via vivid, engaging characters and both employ comedy to deal with the potentially difficult subject matter.
In Citizenship, the protagonist, Tom, has a recurring dream in which he embarks on a passionate kiss with somebody, and throughout the play he embarks on a confused search to find out who it was - a boy or a girl.
'Mark's play has lots of movement and is a more realistic piece, which feels like TV and which is really his bag,' says Walsh. 'Mine is fast and more static - a debating society that I throw on stage.'
Walsh says he was put in touch with Ravenhill by  the National Theatre. 'They told me they were making this new  canon of work for kids, being performed by kids, and they wanted me to write something. Initially, I didn't have any ideas, but I said if I came up with anything I'd call. What I didn't realise at the time was that from a writer's point of view this would prove very liberating.
'I'd never written for that age group before, and I ended up writing it in just five days - a scene a day. Usually I'd torture myself over form and language but this was very loose and it was an excellent thing to do. It's an incredibly naive piece in a lot of ways but it hits the zeitgeist.'
Walsh is working on a movie version of Chatroom  and it isn't the first time one of his plays has made the move to celluloid. His 1996 play  Disco Pigs, about two Irish teenagers nicknamed Pig and Runt and their journey to adulthood, was adapted for the big screen in 2001.
Disco Pigs' original script was written in  colloquial language, causing the Washington Post to comment: 'It is nearly as impenetrable on the page as it is performed', although the newspaper also said it was a 'stellar piece of theatre'.
'Disco Pigs was very much about me, with layers and layers on top to distance myself from the piece,' Walsh says. 'But with Chatroom I just thought, 'f*** it. It's just people talking. I can't get involved in the play too much'. It was a case of just keep your distance and don't complicate things too much. And deliver by Friday.'
A prolific playwright, Walsh  recently wrote a  screenplay about IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands who died in the  Maze prison near Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1981. 'They're two-thirds of the way through shooting the film at the moment,'  he says. 'It's due to be released at next year's Cannes film festival.
'I'm delighted to say there has been absolutely no controversy about it.  It's a very straight telling ...  I'm dying for it to come out, as the writer is always the last person to see how it's going to look. But I'm really proud of the piece. We did what we wanted to do.'
Chatroom and Citizenship, Lyric Theatre, HK Academy for Performing Arts,  Feb 13-16, HK$180-HK$480. Inquiries: 2824 3555



Teenage clicks