Adapted and performed by Olivier Ducas and Francis Monty (Théâtre de la Pire Espèce), Ubu on the Table recreates Alfred Jarry’s 19^th century farce, Ubu Roi with puppetry, clowning and chaotic kitchen utensils. Two messy prop tables that look like something from Kitchen Nightmares frame a central table covered in a black table cloth. At each side, two standing lamps with smaller bulbs attached in a ramshackle handmade style focus on the empty table where Ducas and Monty welcome us into the space. They bicker over the angle of the light, warn us about emergency exits and select an audience member in the front row to watch extra carefully without divulging what is going to happen to her during the performance. They do this with an excited tattle and drawn-out speech where they undermine each other, finish each other’s sentences or create sound effects that have the audience warmed and giggling before the show has even started.

There is a good mash-up of love, sauciness and gruesome battles in the narrative which is told using everyday kitchen items and utensils who take their turn to be paraded along the table top in true royal fashion. The pair waste no time in getting down to business as a  glass dressing jar with a wide bottom and narrow  top, Ubu, is kissed frantically until he literally pops his cork by a mop -like washing up brush (his wife) rendering this a strictly adult show. There is something slightly weird but truly wonderful in watching kitchen items do the dirty with each other in the stylised fashion that Ducas and Monty create with heavy rumbling accents and silly noises.

This adaptation of Ubu Roi (like Jarry’s original) sets the story in Poland. Power, greed and evil actions are satirised, highlighting the absurdity of Machiavellian style rule often aspired to by those in power. The narrative follows a typical journey of usurpation, double-crossing and fighting to maintain power with a healthy dollop of sexual antics in the mix. The glass dressing jar, Ubu, overthrows the King of Poland, played by a large teapot, and his son, the mini teapot, seeks vengeance and declares war. Captain Bordure, the rigid hammer, is an evil Duke who eventually rebels against King Ubu by having raunchy antics with his washing-up-brush wife and going to war with an army of forks. The objects are plain and undecorated except for one – the protagonist Ubu, who has eyes and a coloured handle for a nose. The inanimate objects are unobtrusive and only become interesting in the hands of Ducas and Monty who embody each character from head to toe and whose focus never once flutters away from the speaking object and his respective human.  This is a style of puppetry where the expression and communication is centered around the puppeteer, both man and object become one; however rather than the human fading into the background these two do quite the opposite. They create a piece on three planes: their whooshing sound effects in the background, their speech and embodiment in the position of particular characters in the mid-plane, and their manipulation of the objects in the foreground. This makes the piece fast moving, full of content and constantly engaging.

In a play on the nickname taken from the original title, King Turd, this adaptation takes poo references to the extreme, using them as a metaphor for the treatment of society and as literal events in the narrative. When a scene is created in the throne room, a red woollen scarf rolls out and trumpet introductory noises, mimicking those used to announce entry to a great hall, are repeated between sentences at top speed. This creates the most vivid of scenes with minimum objects and decorations. The same scene-setting reoccurs for King Ubu with toilet paper rolled out in place of a red carpet in a play on the throne room. Constipation, diarrhoea and general guttural functions are a prominent theme in the work taking a large role in the battle of loaves with cutlery sticking out of them to help defend his rule.

Once in power, the mop wife spends all of Ubu’s money so they need to kill the Nobles to gain their wealth. A brain-zapping machine flies in for a wonderful scene where Noble spoons are catapulted from the ruler towards the quivering audience member selected at the start of the show. The conversations, deliberations and tactics used but each silver spoon Noble before he is executed are hilarious, the suicide jumps are ridiculously dramatic, as is every entry and exit of a character. Corkscrews helicopter in and the Duke gallops, as does his human counterpart, in a rigid posture drawn from the characteristic of the hammer.

When Ubu sends a wooden toy pepperpot to spy on the Duke, a tabletop tango emerges between the Duke hammer and The Queen washing-up-brush who are sensual, sexy and downright dirty with each other, mirrored by the wooden spy who is following their every move. The recounting of the events to the King Ubu, who requires a full demonstration from the pepper pot spy, are the icing in the cake for this scene.

The joy and sophistication of this piece lies in the thorough embodiment and expression of so many different characters by Ducas and Monty who take on board the object’s features to create their portrayal. The adaptation and imaginative recreation of characters and the satirical nature of the play that appeals to a contemporary audience make the work more poignant, particularly as it is performed in several languages across several countries. Most of all, I laughed from beginning to end at the endearing teapots and animated, charismatic performers.

Zöe Murtagh performs a coming-of-age piece (created in collaboration with Tory Copeland), in which she talks us through her realisation of her own anxiety, and what that means, having completed a course of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. She takes to the microphone and talks openly and frankly about what it feels like to know that you suffer from anxiety, and what happens when she experiences a panic attack.

Murtagh potters around the cupboard and washing line that dress the stage, in a section that hints at, but could unpack further, the necessity to perform certain rituals and to order things in particular ways in obsessive compulsive tendencies that can form part of anxiety disorder.

As she begins to speak, Murtagh’s factual information and personal conversations are well written, informative and honest: ‘I have anxiety, it’s mine’ is an important statement that helps dissipate the stigma that surrounds mental illness. The work is at risk of becoming a narcissistic take on a personal experience when it has the potential to speak to every man and woman; to make wider statements about society and mental illness as a whole. The foundations are here to make a fair work into an interrogative one.

Speech, movement, demonstrations and factual information create different sections that include movement, poems, props and suits. As part of CBT exercise, the viewers are taken through a series of physical interventions designed to change the physical symptoms of panic. What if these were developed into a movement phrase? Or what if the audience were required to join in? The film Labyrinth is described using the characters and narrative as a metaphor for overcoming anxiety and dealing with every possible outcome, the worst and the best, which creates a funny and imaginative way of changing automatic thinking and assessing the risk of worrying events.

Tirades of negative thinking, real concerns and worries flow from Murtagh’s clear speech like a waterfall of overwhelming thoughts. She works her way through a wedge of note cards, each with a worry, a trigger or a prediction on it, getting faster and faster until the floor is covered in this splurge from an anxious brain. This is a beautiful moment where the abundance of negative thought is made tangible for those who might not understand the feeling. Wearing a suit with physical symptoms velcro’d to the body parts, and a hat complete with tentacles that hold what goes on in the brain, creates an visual metaphor for diagrams that are used to explain the physical symptoms in CBT.

There are many promising sections in this piece that need to be developed further via a more profound understanding of the condition, and a deeper creative exploration of where each idea can go. Audience members are given paper bags which they are invited to fill with air and throw onto the stage at the end, but with no reference to them earlier on, this feels like an add-on – but it could be a resounding feature and motif.

Murtagh is a likeable and honest performer who attacks a subject that is a rising problem and key in terms of developing awareness in society today. She is incredibly brave to expose her own experience in order to tackle such a complex subject. Sacré Blue  is funny, informative and a joyful take on mental illness – further development of the piece is encouraged.

Tap dancers Hannah Ballard and Lexi Bradburn take a sexy and silly look at fairytales for the modern day woman, making as much noise as they can in the process. Aptly choosing tales where shoes are the central focus, Sole Rebel Tap replace dainty ballet slippers from The Red Shoes with clunky tap shoes, and lose one in Cinderella’s walk of shame after a night painting the town red.

The theme of red and blushing strings the vignettes together, making Blushed a charming and witty take on the classics that enables the dancers to weave in their hoofing to a loose plot. Ballard, artistic director and Bradburn, co-director of Sole Rebel Tap, collaborate with renowned clown and theatre director Peta Lilly to create this piece, which humorously showcases good tap dancing. The girl who trod on the loaf and Professor Piscaldo are particular new favourites that see Ballard wearing loaves of bread on her feet and Bradburn wearing diving goggles. Bradburn’s expressive characters and manly voices balance well with Ballard’s butter wouldn’t melt persona and both become fierce performers the moment their feet come into play.

The sophistication of the choreography appears when the scene at hand floods the tap dancing with personality or stylistic adaptations. The clearest example of this is their burning hot shoe shuffle to Too Darn Hot from the musical Kiss Me Kate. Bradburn finds herself in Hell and her accents and weight are adjusted to pique her grounded tapping with the image and feeling that she is dancing on hot coals, burning her feet with each tap as she gets faster and faster, wincing as her taps meet the floor for micro seconds.

References to classic films where jazz tap was heavily influenced by ballroom and social dance appear frequently in an homage to the Hollywood tap dancing greats, alongside more contemporary songs such as Lionel Richie’s Stuck on You, (where Ballard’s shoe gets stuck to the floor). Each track is carefully chosen to bring a giggle to that particular scene.

The Little Mermaid scene was long for one of the sections with the least tap dancing. At one point Ballard’s legs are taped together with red gaffer tape in true mermaid style: would it be possible to achieve the impossible and somehow tap dance in this state? Bradburn popping up from behind the table as a lobster wearing oven gloves is pure comedy and I really wanted to see how she would embody this creature in taps! When Ballard finds her feet and learns to walk as a human again, this wobbling, blundering movement scene could be developed with more tap vocabulary and would put the finishing touches on the work. Another section well worth exploring and extending is where Bradburn talks to the mermaid who has cut her tongue out. She can only answer in taps and Bradburn’s running commentary of how Ballard feels embodied in her dancing, is moving, funny, interesting and over too soon.

Sole Rebel Tap have created a tap dancing show that has a charm and character in its quirky jokes and stories performed by two sassy women. The last routine, set to The Beat Goes On, is where the most complex tap takes off as their red shoes paddle, cross-phrase and scrape the floor with the outside edge. The style is rooted in jazz tap, which is in keeping with many of the musical references in he piece, and predominantly making complex rhythms out of the most simple vocabulary; paddles, pick-ups and tap-steps. As the pair break into separate steps, Bradburn layers accented taps over Ballard’s steady beat to create complimentary and satisfying rhythms. This multi-layering, introduced in the opening routine where the pair put a spell on their tap shoes to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ I Put a Spell on You, is musically and technically challenging and riveting to watch and hear.

It’s 10pm at Underbelly’s Circus Hub, and the audience are primed for a sassy show after huddling together in the windy outside bar, before filing into the sold-out big top. Head First Acrobats – Thomas Gorham, Cal Harris and Rowan Thomas – provide just what is needed as they bamboozle viewers with a show tightly packed with silly, sexy and strangely sensuous content. Their individual specialist skills are woven into a loose narrative about a drug experimentation, in which taking a brightly coloured elixir under the instruction of a higher being (their voice booming down over the soundtrack) transforms their bodies in and out of something superhuman. The three characters alternate between wearing white lab coats and following the instructions of the giant organisation, testing the effect of the different potions on each other.

The narrative is simple enough to embellish with joke after joke, and is attacked with a knowingness and awareness of cliché that allows the trio to own their storyline. Their expressive use of clowning – with Rowan Thomas as the butt of the jokes – warms the excitable viewers who marvel at the mix of spectacle and comedy, delivered in equal measures: only these cheeky boys can get away with prancing to the Bee Gees wearing stockings and suspenders, and to Michael Jackson’s Thriller as half-baked zombies, without falling foul of trite references.

The show takes off when the men are instructed to drink the blue elixir from the ominous test tubes laid out on a laboratory table. Thomas manages to spit his out, whilst the muscular Gorham and Harris swallow their potions ready to be transformed in turn. As they find their strength, or embody zombie-like tendencies, their craft and skill on the ladder, trapeze and balance canes take precedence, with one-armed freezes, handstands and all kinds of shapes and compositions in acrobalance emerging.

Moments of true craftsmanship are where the physical performance skills are adapted and developed to continue the narrative, rather than provide a break within it. Gorham’s breakdancing sequence uses inverted floorwork, where the head is predominantly close to or in contact with the floor, threading and windmilling to embody a human in transformation, albeit into a zombie who is trying to find his first steps again, thrown off-balance by his mounting strength. Thomas uses a Cyr wheel in his transformation from a blundering weakling into the exemplary Vitruvian man. He scampers in circles as the spinning hoop chases him round; he manages to be carried by it and thrown off by it. He almost invisibly actions the momentum that allows the wheel to call the shots as he grabs hold and falls off. In this fast-paced ducking and diving in and out, on and off of the wheel Thomas manages to gesture and joke to the audience, maintaining his character play. The momentum feels like a drunken pas de deux between human and hoop, with a heavy undulating flow. When the beat drops, our jaws drop as the tempo, dynamic and rhythm change in an instant. Thomas rotates inside the Cyr wheel at top speed, thrown through and round with a sharp, jerking momentum full of energy, power and control. In this sudden flood of flashing and oscillating shapes, split-second gestures and facial expressions highlight his now dominating control over the hoop, continuing the narrative whilst preventing the fast-moving image from becoming a blur.

Head First Acrobats find the fun in every element of the piece, taking it one step further without over-playing it. Spitting out beer all over the floor, to creating beer fountains, to spraying it into each other’s mouths and potentially to an audience member who has already become the victim of Thomas’s hugs, ball games and sexual innuendos is just one example of many sketches that string the skills and humour together.

The show is predominantly front-facing and the performers’ expressive eye contact and emotive faces do not reach side audiences to their fullest effect. As they teeter upon the ridiculous on their teeterboard dressed in lingerie, the late showing allows for an inebriated audience to enjoy sexual references and innuendos, the crowd getting stuck into the sheer entertainment that Elixir’s bromance and sex appeal has to offer.

Friday evening at Dance Base, and a jolly audience laugh out loud as performers Chess Dillon-Reams and Cristina MacKerron, reveal their innermost thoughts and conversations, drawing us into their friendship through a mixture of charisma and sheer will. The cyclical narrative of May-We-Go-Round? gives the audience an insight into their dating sagas complete with emotional torment and the subsequent response of the supportive friend. Both women shift between caring and offloading, taking centre-stage and forming a one-(wo)man chorus by mirroring or clapping a tambourine behind, in a shared relationship of mutual respect and understanding.

There is a growing trend towards celebrating womanhood, and a female friendship taking centrestage over the traditional love story does just that. Here this dynamic pair explore growth, identity and life’s knockbacks with tenderness and outright silliness. They use a vocabulary of hip hop and contemporary dance, laced with an over-emphasised mimicking and mocking style which illustrates narratives and emotions with humour. Fast footwork, ridiculous pelvic thrusts, quirky gestures and expansive leaps and falls, top rocking and cheesy jazz inform the rich dancing that takes the audience through these girls’ trials and tribulations.

Fast transitions between gendered behaviours see the energy suddenly hiked up towards exhaustive climaxes. Chess and Cristina (as they refer to themselves throughout), repeat flirty poses, pointing their legs and toes whilst repeating elongated ‘ooooohs’. Speech and movement distort and grow into an embodiment of an angry, sexually motivated, ‘geezer’. Fast moving, talking and grunting, these women can be ‘male’ if they so desire; worship the men they put on pedestals, or expose male behaviours at their crudest and rudest.

From a beat-boxed heartbeat to flirty peacocking and bold camaradery, the physical embodiment of signs, gesture, and grounded movement mock and mimic the subject. There is a hoody pas de deux, a bra-swinging port de bras, and even time to share a vodka and cranberry with an already half-baked audience!

The skipping phrase enforced on them to break up each story perfectly demonstrates the boredom of life’s disappointments, and the tedium of having it thrust upon you again and again. The structure of the work broken up by these plodding pathways balances the reliving of experiences with outrageous passion and energy, giving all time to recover.

Men in the audience laugh from their very core, but the joke is on them. They will never experience something as strong and dynamic as this female friendship which portrays women as kind, compassionate, strong and expressive of emotion with the ability to understand and deal with it. It also allows them to take on male characteristics whilst happily donning heels and getting dressed together to hit the town a minute later. Women can and are all these things and the male love interests are a mere sideshow to what is really at play here.

The sections that frame and draw a raucous piece into our hearts and minds are where one narrates the rise and fall of the other’s relationship. Whether it be with Matt with the blonde spiky hair, or the fit PE Teacher, each epic narrative is reduced to few statements whilst the girl dresses with an extra item of clothing, a tiny bit more with each spoken phrase. We see her pause and begin to undress as the narrative takes a turn in a shifting in and out of love and in and out of identities. In a story that every women can relate to, this chapter for the girls is bought to a close by the donning of all the items from every boy and every relationship at the same time. They cover, smother, protect and embellish a multi-layered identity that is stripped bare ready for the next chapter of adventures.

May-We-Go-Round is one for everywoman, full of tears and laughter.