"It’s not about us — it’s all about you.” With these words the young writer and director James Phillips handed over responsibility for the success of the 2009 Sunday Times National Student Drama Festival to the 800 or so students taking part. Phillips is one of a team of a dozen theatre professionals who spend the year travelling to schools, colleges and universities across Britain to watch student productions that have been entered for possible performance at the week-long festival. This year, 88 productions were entered — 12 made it to Scarborough, the festival’s home since 1990.

Collectively, the students presented a grim picture of the world they are about to inherit. Subjects addressed included bulimia, kleptomania, sadomasochism, brain damage (twice), child murder, mass murder, elephant murder, and buggery with a bottle.

There can be no bleaker view of the world than in Simon Stephens’s 2001 drama Herons, given an admirably stark revival by Clive Judd for Manchester University. Three scrapings from the bottom of an east London sink estate form a chorus of menace around the harmless Billy (Simon Longman), who is struggling to cope with the utter social breakdown represented by his alcoholic mother (Elie Rose) and catatonically depressed father (Mark Weinman). The relentless swearing is a figure for the complete moral destitution the play confronts us with. Billy tries to escape, but is forced to act as violently as those who threaten him.

Judd won the Director’s Guild award for this spare production, which also gained a clutch of acting awards, including the Spotlight award for an outstanding performance by Edward Franklin as the head hoodie. Yet Stephens’s play refuses any kind of political analysis, or to show any way out of our modern dystopia.

There was no more comfort to be found in Edinburgh University’s revival of Anthony Neilson’s 1991 Normal. Based on the trial of a German serial killer, executed in 1931, it links this horror story to the rise of fascism, a point quietly underlined by Paddy Loughman’s sinisterly Hitlerian body language in his award-winning performance as the killer. The message of Normal is that we all have the capacity to kill and that, as in Herons, abuse is handed down from generation to generation.

Many characters seen in this festival week were damaged in some way: the two women clinging to each other in a psychiatric halfway house in Blackpool and Fylde College’s beautifully realised revival of Gillian Plowman’s Me and My Friend; the child (Edward Franklin again) in Claire Urwin’s new play, No Wonder. By the hospital bed of his comatose father, the boy and his mother weave a lyrical narrative, based on fairy tales, that reveals a nightmare. The child has witnessed his parents’ erotic role-play based on Peter Pan, sending their fantasy horribly wrong.

At least the victims in Return to the Silence, Warwick University’s devised dance-documentary, are not responsible for their brain damage. Led by its director, Jack Lowe, the company sets out to explore the various ways in which the brain can suddenly malfunction. Inspired by the writings of Oliver Sacks, and starting with the experience of the neurologist Jill Bolte Taylor, who describes her own haemorrhage, the company uses dance, speech and live and recorded video to create an imaginative and emotional landscape to draw down pity on what might have been dry case studies. Seated in wheeled trucks reminiscent of hospital beds, the audience has its perspective constantly shifted as they are pushed and spun about.

The company won an award for this creative landscape; the pianist Adam Alston won the Cameron Mackintosh award for a musical score that helps to hold this episodic but powerful piece together.

Even where there was no actual damage, there was a profound sense of lack. In Joe Richards’s ingenious new work for Dartington College of Arts, Vowel Play, the four young women brought together for a recording session lack the ability to use more than a single vowel. Each is restricted to either A, E, I or O. This tricky conceit — example: “The town’s got no Woolworth’s now” — made intriguing connections between vowel sounds and character, but the stories told were all of sexual misery and unmet desire. It was not really a full range of vowels they lacked, but a fulfilled life.

The same goes for the University of East Anglia’s Tub and Hull University’s Never Enough. Tub, by Olivia Vinall, is an elegant, two-handed performance piece set in a bath, where a girl finds herself constantly plunged into her past by the memory of a former lover. Never Enough is a genuine dance drama, mixing award-winning choreography with a dramatic narrative that explores the respective appetites for thieving, chocolate and rough sex of the male and two female performers. While the plot was over-contrived, there was no doubting the commitment these untrained dancers brought to the physical images they created.

There was some comic relief during the week, but even the one intentionally funny contribution to the festival began with a coffin.

Written, directed and performed by Jonathan Brittain, admirably supported by Ashley Booth, this second entry from the University of East Anglia won a comedy award for the verve with which they turned The Wake into a multiple-charactered cross between Pirandello and Whitehall farce.

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