Correspondence (Old Red Lion Theatre)

Agony and ecstasy, love and hate: the great, universal struggles of humanity are all there to be lived out in the humble video game. If only parents, teachers, and shrieking tabloid newspapers understood them, eh? Correspondence imagines two teenagers living worlds apart but who make unlikely friends in the fantasy land of online shoot-'em-ups. Ben from Stockport (Joe Attewell) and Jibreel from Syria (Ali Ariaie) plug in their headsets and start spraying bullets and banter. It's spring 2011, and Ben strikes up a conversation about the Syrian revolution. It looks like a seismic event, but Britain doesn't seem to care, since there's Kate Middleton's wedding dress to discuss.

When Jibreel vanishes from the game one day, Ben obsesses over his digital buddy's safety, and skips class to fly to Syria on a rescue mission. Harriet, a girl from school (Jill McAusland), forces her way into his plans. Although she might seem the embodiment of western apathy – someone whose earth ends at Manchester – in fact she and Ben are creating an altogether different kind of youth uprising. He's rebelling against the dysfunctional regime of his divorced parents (Joanna Croll and Mark Extrance); she, against the poverty of her prospects as a millennial with bad grades. Lucinda Burnett's play makes an interesting point about relativity here. It turns out that you don't have to live in a warzone to face battles – and the subtext to all of this is that Ben really does face clear and present danger from his deteriorating mental health.

With video-game bleeps punctuating the action, and characters bouncing around the place at hyper-accelerated speed, director Blythe Stewart blurs the line between real and unreal. Jibreel and Ben are both escapists, after all. Jibreel likes Katy Perry, wears Adidas tracksuits, and dreams of one day going to London to lose his virginity at uni. For him, video-game invincibility offers a way to achieve the seemingly unachievable – while keeping your head down, too. Forget going out for fresh air and exercise: there's real death and gunfire in the streets. As for Ben – well, his town is dead, too. Dead stifling. Gaming lets him blast away all his troubles and, in a sense, to learn about the world.

There is already enough intrigue in a story about a person getting fixated on the affairs of a foreign land without the story needing to also be about that person's madness. Not that this detracts from a thoughtful and fiercely political play, but considering the relatively brief run-time, that second strand does dictate that characters and events have to escalate very quickly. But, you know, maybe that's only right. This is all about reflecting, half a decade later, about how things can spiral out of control in a single moment. And Correspondence owns that moment with cynical wit.

Correspondence runs at The Old Red Lion Theatre until 2 April.