The Harvest (Soho Theatre)

Overhead, the apples are ripening, almost ready for harvest. So too are the four teenage fruitpickers below: two boys and two girls, flirting among the fruit trees. They race up ladders and stretch to reach low-hanging fruit, making eyes at each other every chance that they get. When they pass apples between one another, they do so with the slow significance of lovers swapping keepsakes.

Pavel Pryazhko’s comic short (in Sasha Dugdale’s translation) isn’t so much a coming-of-age story as a snapshot. It starts realistic, with the petty sexual politics of teenagers trying to prove themselves, and soon blossoms into metaphor.

Stern, self-appointed Valerii (Dyfan Dwyfor) is the ultimate mansplainer. Careful, he says: apples bruise easy and just one bad apple can rot through a crate. Doltish Egor (Dafydd Llyr Thomas) looks guilty. He may have been a touch rough. Cue a mad search for bruises and fruit flying everywhere.

The four are careful at first, keen to preserve the crop, but the frustrations of work soon break them down. Workers bruise too, and rot sets in fast.

A crate breaks. Its bottom falls out and the boys transform into natural born handymen. Out come the tools and a tussle for male supremacy begins, as they attempt – cluelessly – to hammer a nail through a board. (You’d think it was a MENSA entry test, the hash they make of it). The girls, Lindsey Campbell’s wide-eyed Lyuba and Beth Park’s knowing Ira, look on and laugh.

It’s a neat routine of one-upmanship and incompetence, laced with fnar-fnar innuendo about tools, hard wood and nailing things. Pryazhko skewers the bloated over-confidence of young men and ties sexual attraction to workplace prowess. Ripening into maturity means bearing fruit – literally and metaphorically.

At the same time, though, The Harvest diagnoses a work-shy generation. The boys walk around with matching bloody thumbs; the girls incur hayfever and bloody noses. The crates, meanwhile, disintegrate; rotten tools provided by a rotten boss. Little wonder they start looking for shortcuts until, eventually, they’re shaking trees violently in a bid to save time.

First, the workers buckle, then the whole orchard; after the economy, the environment. It’s all a bit over-ripe.

Still, former RSC boss Michael Boyd’s production, in town after its Bath Ustinov run, is made by four winning performances. On Madeleine Girling’s deconstructed orchard, where apples hang on strings like a childish party game, the young actors make a careful calibrated quartet, as egos collide and attractions overlap.

The Harvest runs at Soho Theatre until 13 June.