Snowflakes, an excellent title, rehashes The Dumb Waiter by Harold Pinter. A guest in a hotel room is visited by two intruders posing as staff. The intruders are hired assassins who accuse the guest of committing a half-explained hate crime on social media. His punishment, execution, will be livestreamed as a warning to other hate criminals.

It’s a thrilling start but the show lacks tension and the accused’s back story isn’t explained fully. And once the sentence has been carried out, the story becomes predictable. The core idea – freelance killers dispensing justice on behalf of tech giants – would make a great TV series. It needs a lot of development.

Village Idiot, another great title, is a state-of-the-nation play set in a village that stands on the route of HS2. The bulldozers can’t flatten the last remaining property because a stubborn granny refuses to take the developer’s shilling and sell up. An official, Peter, arrives to evict Granny but he turns out to be her grandson. This looks like an intriguing drama that pitches corporate greed against the ties of a close-knit family, but the writer, Samson Hawkins, discards his best asset and explores tribalism and prejudice instead. He drops Granny and focuses on a tepid affair between Peter and a gay black man who may or may not have gypsy heritage too. A second romance flourishes between two youngsters who appear to be neurodivergent.

Hawkins is a talented and witty dramatist but he chooses to follow the present craze for ‘oppressed’, ‘marginalised’ and ‘silenced’ figures. And, this being a subsidised show, it has to offer us moral lessons about good and evil, and the characters are divided accordingly. Peter and his black boyfriend are good people so they come across as sweet, smiley and tedious. The older characters are evil and must be condemned. Granny swears a lot, makes loathsome racist comments and delivers coarse speeches about her sex life. Her enemy, Kevin, is a self-regarding misogynist who willingly sells his property to HS2 and boasts about spending the windfall on a Thai bride ‘with big tits’. Evil Kevin is also a halfwit who can’t distinguish Taiwan from Thailand. And most of his rhetoric is tinctured with Benny Hill-era bigotry. It seems odd to fight a strain of sexism that was all but extinct several decades ago, and the show feels like a perverse attempt to resurrect prejudice so that the characters can defeat it afresh.

The story runs out of puff in the first half and the show dwindles into a series of monologues and skits about rural life. Even that seam of humour wears thin and the actors perform show tunes and talent-show spoofs. A hefty chunk of the budget is lavished on a pastiche of Cher’s video ‘If I Could Turn Back Time’ performed by Peter in a wig and fishnets. His drag costume earns a predictable whoop of applause from the playgoers who know exactly how to respond when ‘diversity’ is celebrated in public. This isn’t a drama but a political rally for brainwashed zombies. However, if Hawkins can escape the crippling fetters of artistic orthodoxy he could write something exceptional.

Dancing at Lughnasa, written by Brian Friel in 1990, would delight the bureaucrats at the Arts Council. We’re in rural Donegal in 1936 where a family of prattling twerps are sinking in folly, fecklessness and intellectual inertia. The eldest sister works as a teacher but faces redundancy. Her four younger siblings knit gloves for a living – which sounds like a pastime rather than a profession – but their income is threatened by a new garment factory. Though skint, the girls wear decent clothes and have plenty to eat. Their ample kitchen boasts a fresh granite floor covered by a colourful woven rug imported from Persia. On the shelf sits a new Marconi wireless set which, we’re told, plays folk music ‘direct from Dublin’. Why from Dublin? This seems to be the only village in the Irish Free State where no one plays a musical instrument.

The sob sisters are joined by two spectacularly depressing males. Gerry is an incompetent salesman from Britain who jabbers endlessly in a fake posh accent. And Uncle Jack is a mopey priest who spent 25 years in Uganda trying to catch leprosy but failed. Instead he came home with a consolation prize – malaria. And it’s terminal, of course, because everything in this play is destined to go wrong. To underline its message of woe, the play is narrated by a pessimistic spoilsport who pre-announces each new disaster before it materialises. Having revealed Uncle Jack’s diagnosis he tells us which of the five sisters will flee to England and die in a squalid bedsit in the 1950s.

Famine zones are more fun than this play and yet Brian Friel’s shrieking bumpkins are exactly what the Arts Council wants us to see. A tyranny of deadbeats, halfwits and losers.