Difficult to follow, peppered with slang and reflecting a strange sub-culture. And I'm just referring to the opaque information given in the programme for this Oxford Youth Theatre production by writer Sean Burn, written partly in mobile phone text language. Voices was billed as a project to give a platform to young people who don't normally access performance arts. It's an in-yer-face work, featuring video clips, CCTV footage (cameras pan the audience and foyer, broadcasting the images to screens in the theatre) and pumping beats, spliced with vignettes about life on a decaying estate populated by disillusioned, angry youths.

The most powerful sign of how young people feel excluded was not produced by the play itself but the audience. The majority of those who watched it with me last week were teenagers. Those of us who waved farewell to adolescence years ago sat huddled in a group on one side of the theatre. Were we feeling threatened by the youngsters around us, in their baggy skater jeans and hoodies?

I found Voices uncomfortable viewing, but not for the reason Mr Burn hoped. For no good reason, since the audience did not move around, the seats had been removed. Spending about an hour and a quarter sitting on a step would make anyone's back ache.

One of the most striking parts of the two-act production was a dance routine in which several members of the cast, with boxes shaped like CCTV units covering their heads were transformed into automata, as they quivered and swayed on gantries overlooking the graffiti-daubed stage.

Another disturbing scene, provoking chilling thoughts of the Colombine High School massacre in the US, saw one of the group of 'losers' lob a home-made bomb into a crowd in a bid to make some sort of nihilistic statement and wreak revenge on his peers.

A lot of effort went into this work, but I can't have been the only person who went away confused. Nonetheless, Voices was imaginative in its lively use of multi-media, albeit mostly pessimistic and drawing on familiar elements of urban frustration.