Care in the community. An odd phrase and one that, for most of us, now holds very specific conotations. But in Robert Holman's Bad Weather, though the phrase is never uttered, care in the community takes on quite another meaning - the care that people have for and of one another. Or even, the ability to care, period. Are we losing it? Bad Weather suggests we are, and that it can be regained, but at a cost.

A play of surrogate mommas and papas that sits fascinatingly beside the Other Place's other new play, Richard Nelson's Goodnight Children Everywhere, Holman takes enormous risks of fusion, dissolving barriers between the most unlikely of associates - deprived teenagers from Teesside, the down-trodden mother of one of them, an ex-con juror who falls for her when her son is imprisoned, and a sophisticated Frenchwoman.

Implausible maybe, yet it works. For Holman, sometimes prone to over-sentimentalising, also has such real heart and care for his characters that we, in our turn, come also to care desperately for these unlikely intimates and how they will negotiate their way to a recognition of their shared humanity.

A play then, corny but moving, of redemption through love, Steve Pimlott's beautifully paced, watchful RSC production boasts three brazen portraits of youthful despair in the performances of Paul Popplewell, Emma Handy, and Ryan Pope, wonderfully matched by Susan Brown's emotionally damaged Kay, Barry Stanton as her male ballast scorched by his own instincts, and Susan Engel's mesmerisingly dangerous Agnes - bridge-builder, honest broker, disciplinarian, and ultimately unlikely lover to the most aggressive of the young tearaways. A true gem.