The team who made last year’s Buddhism: Is It Just For Losers? (whose title was one of the funniest parts) have hit comedy gold this time, with a forty-five minute shake-down of performance that leads you right up the proverbial garden path and straight into the man-shed.

It skewers all theatrical tropes and theories about what acting is, who is doing it, how to put truth on stage and what an audience will or will not believe. The ‘plot’ is about how theatre is made and the show constantly shifts both its perspective and our perception.  A variation then, of ‘let’s put the show on right here!’ done with sorry masculine flourish and silly props: tiny hammers, a plastic strong-bow, some phoney recording devices and an overlarge box.

Although The Room in the Elephant lacks the visual aesthetic of Buddhism – in which the costumes and puppets were fabulous – putting the emphasis on the devising process and plot (or rather the lack of it) frees the actors up. They just have to record what they are doing ‘in the moment’ so they can do it again for real, less well. When the projected script goes blank on the screen, they are lost for words, and when Joe Mulcrone gets really angry – is he really angry or acting angry? Can his acting ever be that good? They hammer a nail into the wall, against the terms of their contract with the theatre. They are aghast to discover that their leaflets carry the show’s old title Fingers, Fists and Feelings.

The show is credited to Inconvenient Spoof (Matt Rudkin) with Cat and Mouse Theatre (we presume the other two). There is an interesting dynamic between the three performers. Matt Rudkin was tutor to Meredith Colchester and Joe Mulcrone on the now sadly-defunct Theatre with Visual Arts course at University of Brighton, and they have made a few shows together, seeded through Matt’s regular Happy Clap Trap variety nights. Now they are on a more equal footing (or at least, this is what they are playing out onstage): creatively and financially it’s a three-way split. So Matt’s role as theatrical auteur, demanding ‘There is to be no acting, write it down, learn it and you’ll come across as wooden and shit’ is countered by Meredith’s clowning and Joe’s insistence on story and character.

Alongside the examination of meta-theatre we get shed-building, real-life enactments (Joe broke his leg two weeks ago) several visual gags, a live-art video, cod-philosophy about the sexual attraction of birds, some distracting (intended?) corpsing and a moment of discomforting manly banter.

If all this seems too self-referential and knowing for your taste, sit tight, Room In The Elephant keeps on giving and is full of surprises. The ending is total hoot. Of course the company won’t approve of my critique, as Matt made clear in the show, ‘Did you ask her for her feedback? I fucking hate that.’

For those who grow up by the coast, the sea has a mighty pull. Swimming off the jetty, watching the tide roll back across the vast, winkle studded mud flats of the Estuary. I can smell it now. If, like Lorraine, you are a Celtic mythical seal-woman, the ocean is eventually going to draw you back, no matter how much you love Alan, or your boy.

Bucket Club’s cleverly staged, disarming play is a proper treat. It takes a simple romantic premise (boy meets girl, parents disapprove, baby is born, dad dies), but makes the girl a Selkie and thus spins it into something beyond the everyday. No happy endings here.

All the mechanics of the production are on stage for us to see, with Becky Ripley (co-writer with Nel Crouch) and David Ridley (sound designer) providing sound effects, commentary, a wonderfully passive-aggressive mum and quiet dad. A slowly ticking clock evokes the living room, the grating of knife against fork backgrounds an embarrassingly silent meal. The musicality is seamlessly integrated into the action and some perky songs, beautifully sung, move the story along. I’ve seldom seen it done better.

Katie Sherrard as Lorraine (named after Lorraine Kelly off the telly) conveys essence of seal in just a mucky anorak and has an emotional intensity beyond caricature. Young marine biologist and seal fanatic Alan never questions her ‘otherness’ – the over-salty food, the lengthy baths underwater breathing through a straw, the fondness for being nude. It is a warm and rounded performance by Adam Farrell and they both negotiate skilfully a set comprised of plastic bottles.

If the plot leaps ahead rather too quickly, to parenthood, dad’s death and Lorraine’s unhappy lot, the action is always engaging and the key relationship well drawn. There is great economy and inventiveness in Nel Crouch’s direction and in the text, which is naturalistic and funny: ‘Leamington Spa! You have brought me to the most landlocked town in Great Britain.’

Finding Lorraine’s ‘skin’ in the attic seals her fate (sorry, that’s an Alan-type pun) and there follows a nicely unpresuming ending to a playful and enjoyable hour.

Homer portrayed Odysseus as a man of outstanding wisdom and shrewdness, eloquence, courage and endurance. His wanderings and the recovery of his house and kingdom are the central themes of the Odyssey.

James Joyce, in Ulysses – the novel that shifts Homer to one June day in Dublin 1904 – makes his hero Leopold Bloom a man of similar qualities. Bloom is cautious, intelligent, sympathetic and similarly rooted in his family.

Odd then, that Menagerie’s production turns Bloom into a bit of a simpleton, a man who trips and fumbles and lacks the quiet sense of himself and his history that is so fundamental to Joyce’s character. Taking Bloom on a journey outside of the book should be a great catalyst for adventure and writer Richard Fredman has really let his imagination run loose here. The result is a muddled and only partially successful exploration of history, personal and universal.

The plot has the Leopold Bloom of 16 June 1904 meet a different version of himself, one who wants to take him to the future via the past. Actor Patrick Morris becomes fairly schizophrenic in his effort to converse with himself across centuries. It’s a bravura performance but one that would benefit from moments of stillness, less verbiage and more clarity in the dramaturgy.

A synopsis illustrates the complexity of ideas: it’s 1904 and Bloom is unable to perform his ablutions (readers of Ulysses will know that the description of Bloom’s morning dump caused outrage on publication). The cause of his blockage is that Bloom future has come to help him explore his provenance, in particular his Jewishness. We meet Bloom’s father, Rudolph Virag, a Jew who converted to Protestantism. What if Virag hadn’t fled Hungary? What if Bloom was transported to Auschwitz and made a camp Kapo? The experience might lead Bloom to name himself Baruch Bloomoso and lead his own tribe in an attempt to create Bloomtopia (a reference perhaps to Bloomusalem in the Circe chapter of Ulysses) and failing. If the future can’t help Bloom find his tribe, perhaps the present can, so the letter in his hat-band from daughter Milly is dated 24 May 2015. She is living on a Kibbutz in Israel, about to do National Service, concerned for her tribe and the one she is forced to oppose. As Bloom so aptly says, ‘out-shits history’ as the resurgence of anti-semitism in across Europe is noted.

These convoluted plot points are performed with energetic flare by Morris and some strong creative touches by director Rachel Aspinwall. Simple things like the calendar pages fading to blank and Virag as a Golem conjured from a sheet and a bucket. Movement around the stage, if frenetic, is well managed and the beautiful paper art of Reiko Wong provides a strong visual picture. The prose is aptly literary and inventive and there are some knowingly playful moments and some audience interaction. Given the experience of the company and the involvement of Cambridge Junction, the production is suitably well lit (designer Anna Barrett) and the sound design by Yas Clarke is very effective, battling against a noisy venue.

Bloominauschwitz is a dizzying 90 minutes that tries to cram in too many ideas and holds the actor hostage to stage business. To free Bloom from the page, walk him forwards or backwards, and investigate his Jewishness is a good basis for a play, but this version needs an edit and a less broadly drawn character. Fredman almost acknowledges this himself, when he has one Bloom proclaim: ‘You don’t know what the feck you’re doing’ and the other Bloom answer,  ‘I’m having fun.’