Is there anything Martha Lott doesn’t do? As well as hosting an outstanding range of Fringe shows at her Holden Street Theatres (check out the excellent Bob Marley, How Reggae Changed the World and Eat the Rich ) she has written, and features in, her own new play, The Debate.

 It is a sharp and timely little black comedy with some serious edge to it.

Sitting in the Principal’s waiting room of prestigious high school are the ambitious tiger mother Mara and her mortified daughter Chloe.

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It is about who should be captain of the school debating team – Chloe or another student whose own mother is also manoeuvring, with some help from the school principal. Everything then escalates when Mara takes to Reddit for some serious cyber slander.

Unafraid of playing unsympathetic characters (who can forget the portrait of Martha in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) in The Debate, Lott’s Mara has a backstory as a rowdy student who now has a career in the  factional world of dirty tricks politicking. Mara is raucous, smart, confident and used to winning by any means. The extent to which she will go, is the nub and message of the play.

Crisply directed by Nick Fagan with lighting by Martin Smith, this production is well suited to The Arch. Martha Lott has written and captured a character who leads us down an ethical sinkhole.

Her unreliable narrative overwhelms the situation to strong theatrical effect. We find ourselves hostage to a runaway Karen. We see it all – from her grating broad accent, to her vengeful attitude to old rival Barry (now high profile in school governance), to her misplaced advocacy for an already capable daughter.

As Chloe, Amelia Lott-Watson convincingly captures the excruciation that Mara causes and provides a youthful moral compass in the absence of any in her hell-bent devious parent.

The Debate is a theatrically engaging petri dish of pettiness and spite, a mix of satire and uncomfortable reality where social media has become a weapon of mass disruption.

The Debate is playing at The Arch at Holden Street Theatres until March 22