After a night and day of writing, collaborating, choreographing and last-minute costume design, 24-hour plays have reached their 25th hour. There's a fittingly celebratory atmosphere for this stage in the term, a late-show playing to a sell-out crowd of friends of the cast and rowdy but appreciative drinking societies. Compère and organiser Tadhgh Barwell O'Connor announces that there will be a prize-giving at the end, and contemplate whether the reason this was allowed staging at the ADC was because it will culminate in their version of a school prize-giving. Or a school sports day, because the audience seems to be largely made up of drinking societies who chant their appreciation at even the weakest jokes (especially when delivered by two women in bras, as in play no.). Most of the plays wisely opt for humour; no1.'Echoes',  features an interview segment  with Grime-rap creation Alopecia Smith, while no.2, 'Public', breaks the fourth wall and features an interpretative dance routine about waiting for the bus.

Its all very self-reverential, very Thespian In-joke. Few of the pieces try for coherence, drawing instead on a collection of theatrical exercises strung-together as comedy. Play no.5, 'Look There', resembles a Literature student purging their mind at the end of term, an abstract (though curiously compelling)  'best of' list of lines from Shakespeare to Brecht. What the five plays reveal is that with a shotgun to the head and a demand to write, most will fall back on the common tropes and conventions that we associate with modern theatre. I tick off the theatrical check-list; there's the Political one, the Dinner Party from Hell, the One About Relationships.. 'Public' features a cast of stock characters typified by little more than earnings bracket, while no.1, 'Echoes', is a play about writing a play, equal parts lazy and audacious. 

Still with only one day of preparation you can't blame them for falling back on some pre-existing framework, and what is fascinating is that each writer takes these conventions and makes them their own. The clear collaboration between cast and writer, the perfect choreography (fewer tech malfunctions than the average large-scale ADC production); it all shows that  risk-taking can pay off, and that freshness and invention can be better than something over-rehearsed.  Under pressure there's that tension and resourcefulness; the stripped-back scenery puts a focus on the acting instead, and one-liners sparkle, from the poignant 'Love wanted. Come Here', in personals ad satire 'First Person Plural', to 'Public's assertion that 'Shakespeare was a twat'.

After 'Look There' ends on a spooky note, with piped applause fading in from somewhere behind the stage, we join the drinking societies and actors grannies in the bar, dazedly trying to recall each of the five plays and which one we want to won. The votes are collected and counted up; by 1am the public have spoken, and they've chosen 'Public'. Oddly fitting, that. The one-liner prize, naturally, goes to the one about 'dipping Gordon Brown in toffee and feeding him to the diabetics'.