The Trials opens with flickering lights, a howling siren, and a middle-aged man, dressed in a patchworked boiler suit, shoved into the glare of a spotlight to defend his life. You may feel somewhat uncomfortable as he does so, for his crimes – it quickly becomes apparent – amount to living a life recognisably similar to many of those in the audience.

The concept of the play is simple: in the not-too-distant future on a ravaged Earth, the generation responsible for the climate crisis are being held accountable by the young people who must live with its inheritance. With the ‘big polluters’ already dealt with and resources stretched to breaking point, attention has turned to ordinary people and the way they lived their lives – and the penalty is death. From this basic starting point comes an utterly gripping and powerful production.

While the three adult defendants we meet each get their time in the spotlight, the play’s focus is on the jury – twelve young people, all actors from the Nottingham and Mansfield areas. It’s these twelve teenagers who bear the burden of bringing to life the complex conflicts and thematic questions that emerge from the basic premise: questions of justice, revenge, responsibility, privilege, and power.

It’s testament to the skill of Dawn King’s writing that a structure that defies usual conventions of storytelling – we simply have three defendants and three deliberations, and very little is resolved at the end – keeps the audience so rapt. Dystopian futures are a recurrent theme in King’s work, but where her earlier works tended to lean more into allegory and absurdism, this feels all too real: the poisoned air, sweltering temperatures and plundered resources of The Trials are all too familiar from their existing, nascent forms. It’s that familiarity – and the opportunity to see where we may be headed – that gives the play its power.

King expertly gives each of her twelve protagonists space to explore how they have been individually affected by their toxic birthright, and the consequences for the society they themselves will form. Importantly, she also allows them to be children – occasional flights of play, fantasy and adolescent lust interrupting the serious deliberations and serving as reminders of how wrongly this weight has been placed on such young shoulders. And she doesn’t let herself off the hook, with the middle section exploring the role of the arts in enabling the climate crisis and featuring a thinly-veiled version of King herself as a defendant.

But it’s the young cast who are the stars of this show – all twelve producing extraordinary performances, working impeccably as an ensemble as the focus shifts from one to another, and dealing with the play’s difficult themes with maturity and commitment. Particular stand outs include Noah Baguley as the desperately serious Eden, forever navigating a line between empathy and apologism; Abi Dring as head juror Ren, who especially demonstrates her emotional range as an actor in the closing scenes; and Joseph Grainge as the furious, bereft Noah. Across the board, though, these are thoughtful, engaging performances that are the product of a huge amount of hard work and dedication.

Maria Terry’s design cleverly re-uses elements from other recent Playhouse productions to convey a public space – quite possibly the Playhouse itself – that has been repurposed for the trials now that its previous use has become obsolete. Costumes are make-do-and-mend in the extreme: repurposed goods sacks and individual scavenged items. Again, it’s dystopian but completely recognisable. (It’s surely no coincidence that this reusing of set items and the largely local cast must make this one of the more sustainable productions the Playhouse has ever staged.) Only at the brutal, devastating climax do we see scenic structures clearly built specifically for the show – their purpose serving to emphasise the serious regard in which this production holds its core message.

The striking sound design by Amanda Priestley also deserves particular mention for its sudden, jarring intrusions and otherworldly distortions: as the only representation of the wider world beyond the jury room, we get a sense that the young people called for service are at the mercy of unknowable (and possibly malevolent) higher powers as much as they ever were. It’s one of the ways in which the production avoids easy answers: the characters may be the victims of our selfishness and destructiveness, but the world they inhabit and they themselves are still as prone to vice as we.

Ultimately, The Trials seems to argue striving to do better is both the least and the best we can do – but perhaps by starting now we can avoid the worst extremes of our possible futures. Arguments about exactly where responsibility for the climate crisis lies can never be fully resolved, but we all have the chance to ensure that we can look future generations in the eye and say we did our best.