In this four-hour durational performance, Etchells and Orazbayeva perform simultaneously. Staged in a side room off the main space at the Drill Hall in a long thin space, Seeping Through placed the audience along one long side with the performers along the other long side. This made it difficult to enter or leave the space surreptitiously, and so the coming and going of audience members seemed to form part of the performance.

Tim reads aloud, repeating words and phrases from cue cards and the occasional A4 piece of paper while walking from side to side or sitting. Aisha uses her violin to create sounds, noises, and occasionally music. Tim Etchells chooses a phrase and then spends some minutes vocally exploring the variations of inflection, pace, intonation and meaning of the phrase. Sometimes he allows the phrase to evolve, changing the word ‘my’ into the word ‘your’ for example, and uses his right arm and hand to fling the words out, away, into the audience. Aisha explores the potential of her instrument, the violin and the bow, her fingers and loose horsehair to create a series of sounds. Sometimes as the volume rises or a rhythm emerges from her activities, Tim responds, but mostly they seem to be in their own worlds of performance.

Etchells never seemed to be all that comfortable with what he was doing, sometimes struggling to keep going. The final half hour saw Tim glancing more and more often at the clock, finishing with five minutes of the phrase ‘keep it simple’. Aisha seemed more relaxed about her activity in her standard musician’s blacks, though never acknowledging the audience and hardly looking up at Tim. She seemed completely unaware of Tim’s clock watching and played beyond the 9pm finish time, allowing the sound to find its own natural conclusion. This was intriguingly abstract play, with flashes where meaning and music seeped through.

Surrounded by a string of lights on the floor, two performers with white painted faces and the red mouths and black eye details of clowns take turns reading out to one another a list of questions in this durational piece. ‘Would you like to stop?’ is the key to this game, to which an answer of ‘Yes’ means that the questionee becomes the questioner.

This format is surprisingly and effectively watchable. At first you wonder if there is a rule about answering honestly as Terry O’Connor seems to be doing her best to answer each question to the best of her ability, but then you realise that each person has their own style, both in asking questions and answering them. There is a big ream of dog-eared A4 sheets of paper each with dozens of questions. After a couple of hours of Cathy Naden and Terry O’Connor, Richard Lowdon comes in with some beers to relieve Terry.

Cathy Naden is eminently watchable on stage, bringing an assured poise to her performance, relaxed yet with a remarkable attention to the moment and an assured stagecraft. Terry O’Connor, in contrast, seems vulnerable, a little crumpled, and Cathy plays with this like a cat plays with a mouse, alternatively indulgent and then honing in on Terry’s instinct for honesty. Asking ‘What do you really want?’ repeatedly, waiting for the answer Terry seems to be seeking to avoid. There’s a turn toward interrogation that runs as an intriguing undercurrent though the format. All the performers use the printed questions as only a loose prompt for further improvised questionings, and when the questioner occasionally strays into statement it is only for a moment as the structure of asker/answerer is what makes this durational piece what it is. When O’Connor is replaced with Lowdon the energy of the piece shifts and becomes harsher, more competitive. The energies are subtly shifted and Richard’s questions sometimes seem accusations to which Cathy responds with assured humour and aplomb. Longer imaginative connected questioning occurs and there is a hilarious riff about a cheap package holiday in Hell. Quizoola! is an inspired format – a kind of Christmas party game turned into a durational performance – but what makes it work and watchable is the quality of the performers.

This production of the classic tale of a magician and a demon begins with five young men of highly stylised appearance – theatrical costumes of black and white, faces painted in bold two-tone, rubber gloves of pastel pinks and blues – laying out the scenario with text and physical theatre performed with energy and pace. In their hands are handheld LED torches. Throughout the performance this ensemble/chorus use the torches, their bodies, voices, and gloves as incidental characters, props, and furniture to support the unfolding story of the three protagonists. This is a cast of post-A-level teenagers who work well to deliver and dust off an old classic.

When Mephistopheles appears, played by Steffan Evans, his costume sets up an immediate strong contrast and while he may only be Satan’s representative, in his red ecclesiastical outfit and goatee, his assured, powerful, and highly controlled performance feels like an homage to the fallen angel. Faust, played by Akshay Khanna, is a contrast in blue robes. Playing an old man with a high energy delivery is a challenge for the young actor and it is a relief when he regains his youth. The play really takes off though with the appearance of the only female performer, Taylor Hanson as Gretchen, and the romance that follows plays a prominent part in this adaptation by one of the staff at the school.

This production benefits from the limitations that the cast and creatives have imposed upon themselves. By using only words, bodies, rubber gloves, musical instruments, and torches, they inventively create the world of the play and it is this combined with the impressive performances of the three leads that carries the show.

I arrive a minute late, and enter the space as Veronica Hare is already powering up in this spoken word, music, and slide show performance, but she finds time to help me get settled and find a seat even while introducing the character of J – a young high school physics teacher struggling to get by in the Midlands, but with stars in her eyes. Accompanied by Jim Harbourne on a loop pedal mixing his electric guitar riffs, percussion, and vocals, this performance is at first carried by her passionate delivery of the world of J, her mixed life of hardship, hopes, and dreams.

The shows tells the tale of J’s decision to chase a message from a dating app to the far coast of Scotland, using slides and fragments of staging to recreate scenes and conversations of the meetings between J and the man she goes to see, who is inspired by a man called Blair that the performers met in a pub on the far coast of Scotland. What is gradually drawn out is the sense both of the massive differences between these two people – their personalities, their environments, their attitudes, their engagements with life, nature and technology – and the understanding that these contrasts don’t appear all that different after all when viewed from as an epic – from the perspective of the distant stars.

This wonderful, inspiring work manages to work together physics with poetry, good musicianship with impressive spoken word, the immensity of the universe with annoying local planning in tiny rural towns. Created to be staged in rural venues, pubs, and similar unsupported spaces, continuing the company’s experiments with their touring model in previous show Beulah, this piece could bring a tear to the eye of the most hardened local drinker.