Right from the pre-set, the audience view this production through a different lens: directly before us is an empty stage, but we can also see our own reflections in the huge and warped convex mirror encompassing the entire upstage area. This gives an effective hint of what it is to come, a highly stylised and visually compelling exploration of identity – specifically, gender identity and ‘what it means to be a man’.

Rhum and Clay trained at the Lecoq school, and their process emphasises the importance of collaboration with other artists. Here, these influences and directions are very clear, with Testosterone being a fast-paced and extremely physical collaboration with writer/director Kit Redstone (artistic director of Vacuum Theatre). Kit plays himself, the central character seeking to explore his own masculinity, having transitioned from female to male identity two years ago. Kit’s narrative unfolds firstly through direct audience address and then through a montage of stunning physical sequences set in traditionally masculine spaces such as the gym and the football field. These spaces are inhabited by purposely stereotypical characters, delightfully delivered by the company’s artistic directors Julian Spooner as ‘Marlon Brando’ and Matthew Wells as ‘The Sportsman’.

The performance certainly pulls out all the stops in its rigorous exploration of its key question, including wild fantasy sequences in the magic realist style, liberal use of popular music and pop culture references, delightfully exaggerated musical numbers performed by Drag artist Daniel Jacob and of course Lecoq inspired breathtaking movement sequences. These elements are carefully curated to communicate as whole, managing to really interrogate a hugely complex and sensitive topic in a way which fully engages and is at times hilariously tongue-in-cheek. The embedding of a comedic style allows the cast to delve in to the subject in real detail, and Kit’s self-effacing and extremely truthful delivery is a pleasure to witness.

The piece is framed by clever use of repeated refrains and devices; the song ‘King of the Swingers’ punctuates the action, with the line ‘I wanna be like you’ taking on a new level of pertinence, and the narrative itself keeps swinging back to a moment of extreme dilemma for Kit – standing in the male changing room having accidentally borrowed another man’s towel and being too frightened to remove it for fear of what he would reveal. Such notions of fear and shame are explored incredibly well, and the production certainly does not shy away from analysing all angles of its topic, for it is a disturbing truth that transgender people are statistically far more likely to suffer from mental health difficulties. As Kit declares, as he finds himself desperate and alone on a rooftop, ’an act of violence is better than shame’. Yet ultimately, this is a production which is joyous in its subsequent refutation of this very shame, ending on a perfect note of acceptance and celebration which makes it a really impressive and important piece of work.

This innovative production is very well suited to the intimate tent setting of the Pleasance Courtyard’s Green Venue, designed as it is for theatre-in-the-round. The production appealed to me in terms of its interactive billing as a ‘360 degree swivel-seat experience’, where the audience have some autonomy of decision over their view of the play by moving their chairs. This ‘choose your own view’ element cleverly underscores the themes of the piece, a taut and stylised narrative exploring two crumbling marriages, where the view that each character takes is in itself skewed and faulty. This piece however has much more than novel use of swivel chairs going for it; it is delightfully and incredibly precisely choreographed by director Kathleen Douglas to show that the two relationships, different in many ways, share very human and realistic similarities. This is achieved too through Andrew Bovell’s sharp writing, encompassing ensemble speaking, repeated dialogue delivered with subtle tonal changes that speak volumes about subtext, and clever word-play presenting multiple perspectives as both marriages falter at the feet of affairs.

The pace of the piece and commitment of the performers made for an absorbing experience, with each character communicated with integrity, and I was particularly gripped by Phil Aizelwood’s portrayal of Leon, a seemingly high-status police officer hiding a raft of insecurities. There is a raw and visceral sense of truth pulsating throughout, even in the tongue in cheek sequence of the two husbands accidentally meeting in a pub, football blaring away on a giant screen. The concept of ‘truth in comedy’ is proved never truer than here, a parody of male posturing as a thin veil to hide immense inner turmoil. The female characters are explored in equally keen detail, finding themselves meeting in what appears to be a seedy pic- up joint, their conversation tinged with concerns about their supposedly fading looks and desirability that is at once as painful as it is easy to relate to.

The use of space and proxemics is a particularly interesting component, for as the in-the-round staging is full of audience chairs, the actors must move around the outskirts with very specific steps, occasionally using the central space traverse-style, sometimes mirroring the gestures of their opposite number exactly, whilst layering an entirely different meaning or emotion upon them. This juxtaposition is startling and often deeply affecting, making for a fascinating deconstruction of the characters, their relationships and the notion of human fallibility. This in itself was enough for me, the microscopic analysis of these people was so real and fraut that little more was needed. However, layered over the top of this was a narrative about a woman who was missing, perhaps murdered. This I found quite hard to fathom in its entirety, and the ending of the piece seemed to hinge on this sub plot, perhaps to parallel what had happened in the two relationships, but unfortunately I rather failed to grasp the conclusion. This may of course have been intentional, as this is a two part-narrative, with audiences invited back to see a second performance entitled ‘The Truth’. This device, and indeed the quality and immersive experience of the piece certainly encourages me to see more!

Dancing Brick’s production certainly made me feel like I’d been hit in the face by one – in a good way! We are implored not to reveal the awesome twists that Thomas Eccleshare’s taut and wonderful play takes (always tricky in a review) but when they come, the gasps from the audience are certainly akin to the sounds of people being confronted with a significant blow! But first, we have the set-up, straight away highlighting Eccleshare’s ability to create a supremely tense and beautifully expressed narrative. As a company, Dancing Brick (a collaboration between Eccleshare and Valentina Ceschi) have a background in visual and bold performances, and despite this piece being more heavily text-based than previous productions, the company’s Lecoq influences remain clear from the start. We see some incredibly precise body language and a tangiable stress placed on proxemics and lines of force between actors.

We are introduced to the titular Heather,an aspiring author of the soon to be wildly successful children’s book about a young witch Greta, and Harry her prospective publisher. This comes via a series of email exchanges delivered by the actors in a radio play style. To make such a relatively stationery exchange not only engaging but viscerally tense and clearly loaded with subtext is no mean feat, achieved through distinctive use of gesture and space, and made for compulsive viewing. This sense only increased as the piece progressed, and actually the compulsive nature of the human appetite for stories is a key theme interwoven throughout. A very strong picture is created of Heather, brilliantly played by Charlotte Melia as a mild mannered woman on the outside, with something clearly not right on the inside. Harry is also expertly characterised by Ashley Gerlach as a relatively insincere, overly excitable publisher, beside himself with having discovered this new potential cash cow (perhaps the next Harry Potter?).

Through precise characterisation and slick direction and writing, we are led to believe certain things about these characters, making specific judgements and buying in to their worlds entirely. In this sense, Heather prods at the very roots of storytelling, asking if the identities that we construct for ourselves can be ultimately more compelling than any fictional narratives that an author might create. At its heart, the question highlighted is what matter more, the storyteller or the story? Of course, this vast topic has been much explored in linguistic theory around ‘the death of the author’ as a concept. The play expertly applies this to its exploration by relating it to our seemingly unquenchable thirst for public appearances and interviews with authors, asking how much their identity really matters in the telling of their tales.

The production is clearly structured in three parts, and in the middle section, we see such careful constructions blown to smithereens, following the classic storytelling plot-resolution model impeccably and extremely cleverly. At this point, it is difficult to make sense of the fragments and to know what, if anything, to now believe. The denouement comes in an entirely unexpected and highly creative way, heavy with metaphor and symbolism, and asking more questions than it answers. Here we see the play’s complex message communicated with the company’s trademark use of high-energy physical action as the actors multi-role, becoming characters from the Greta novels, each movement loaded with meaning. This is quite delightful in terms of its sheer inventiveness and the cast’s ability to paint wildly imaginative scenes for us. It is also certainly a rather sudden stylistic U-turn, which of course was clearly included to serve a purpose, but perhaps also jarred a little for me. This may be because I found the middle section so absorbing, that I thought that the play had ended there! In all however, this really was an affecting and clever piece which has stayed with me long after it ended, and is particularly exciting for anyone who has an interest in writing and genuinely likes to be surprised multiple times!

This interactive solo piece from Iraqi-Belgian theatre maker Enkidu Khaled is part lecture, part workshop, part direct audience address, but always complex and often fascinating. At its core, it seeks to address the universal age-old question ‘can art save the world?’ This is lent extra weight by the production’s context, for as the show progresses we gradually learn about Khaled’s own story and experiences as a practitioner in war-torn Iraq; understandably the atrocities witnessed have directly influenced his practice. The vast topic is rendered manageable through application of a specific ‘method’ to skilfully deconstruct its components. This method is therefore a tool to enable Khaled to use personal narratives as potential stimuli for scenic construction. Passionately explained, the four-step process is explored via some audience participation, with some of our own experiences brought to life on stage in a collaborative ‘brain storming’ style process. Firstly translated in to images, the ideas then become words, sentiments, phrases and ultimately usable stage pictures, or as Khaledi prefers ‘environments’; evolving and flexible constructs for devised theatre pieces.

The strength of the work for me lies in its highly experimental nature. Like all experiments it is of course at times messy, disjointed and at the mercy of human failure (when participants misunderstand instructions that need to be followed quite exactly, for example). Even more strongly, there is a really urgent and compelling nature to Khaled’s questioning, lending a gravity to the framing of the piece, and in the best traditions of Boal, Brecht et al, emphasising the possibility of theatre as being a concrete agent for change, despite the many potential hurdles. Like most political theatre, the production certainly contains some challenging subject matter and imagery, though handled very sensitively. Interestingly, post-show, a few audience members accompanied by children questioned the suitability of some of the content, for when the stories of Isis and the inevitable torture come, as well delivered as they are, they are highly visceral too. The obvious flip side of this is the argument that children in other countries are not only hearing about this, but experiencing it directly, which itself raises huge questions with no easy answers and leaves the audience thinking deeply. Some development of technique would also aid the piece even further; in the large venue both sight lines and audibility (particularly for audience contributions) were at times challenging, which obviously becomes incredibly important when the message is so pertinent.

The pace of the performance was extremely well justified by Khaled, who spoke with heart about the need to take our time with his method, highlighting the deeply affecting (and to him, frustrating) fact that ‘art is so very slow, violence is so fast’. Even so, the teacher in me struggled at times with the slow pace of the audience-related exercises, which broke my engagement momentarily, but I acknowledge that this is entirely subjective and maybe comes from my own familiarity in working in a culturally different way. In all, the performance is something hard to pin down, which is some ways, is a part of the delight of it – at once vastly complicated whilst also being accessible, its pieces seem to make sense as a whole. Just like the opening slide show which had questions layered over it, the production’s images read differently when integrated with each other, resulting in a creation which has real feeling and power.

Enkidu Khaled: Working Method was presented as part of the Big in Belgium programme at Summerhall, by Richard Jordan Productions and Theatre Royal Plymouth in Association with RBC/Upper Church).

The Enchanted is a vibrant, devised adaptation of Rene Denfeld’s novel of the same name from young company Pharmacy (recent graduates), who employ a range of effective techniques to bring the hard-hitting and well-written narrative to life. In the dim semi-round space, half hidden within a network of small moveable cages, a group of figures crouch, wearing the muted greys and oranges of prison-regulation clothing. This sets the scene well for a story communicated by a narrator-like figure, the selective mute Arden. An inmate on death row, he silently watches proceedings unfold and relays them back to us in bursts of lyrical description. Actor Max Sisterton characterises him beautifully, with a twitchy nervy physicality and a confiding tone that had the unsettling effect of making me warm to him despite being aware of the fact that I had no idea what his own crime might be. ‘The most wonderful enchanted things happen here’ he tells us, spinning descriptions of magical corridors and how valuable it is to him to see a sliver of the sky from a window, in this way making sense of things and providing a stark contrast to the grim reality of the situation. So the stylistic tone of the piece is set, combining strong elements of physical theatre with what seems to be a mix of Artaudian and Brechtian influences; the repeated use of breath to signify tension, some bombardment of the senses, and an emphasis on gestures to establish status. There is also strong use of episodic scenes, direct audience address, and the breaking of the action to produce alienation and keep one constantly thinking.

In this uneasy environment, we meet York, a wild-eyed self-confessed sociopath who is soon to be executed and is refusing to appeal. As with Arden, there is something very absorbing about the way that he is played, an intensity in Hunter Bishop’s technique that is entirely realistic and at times genuinely frightening. York’s backstory plays out through flashbacks and interviews with the Investigator, a persistent character who unearths a story of horrendous abuse and poverty, played with gusto and real physical dexterity by Siwan Clark. This is disturbing and intense fodder, exploring themes including the cyclical nature of violence, brutality and redemption.

The stimuli material of Denfeld’s novel itself proves an excellent source to explore dramatically, and is well handled by the youthful cast. The simple design aesthetic and very precise choreography lent a tangible tension which kept me engrossed, with some inventive direction from Connie Treves. The key characters, as consistent with the style of a novel, had a real chance to shine with meaty material and roles, and were well supported by a honed ensemble, whom I would have liked to see pushed a bit further with more extended roles. In the same vein, where puppetry was used, it could perhaps have been more consistent as a motif and developed a little more fully.

However, these are minor quibbles with what was a highly engaging piece with the power, in the best Brechtian fashion, to make the viewer really consider the ethics of the material presented. Asked how do we stop men like these happening, and are monsters born, or are they created, the answer for me is far more complex than I may have thought it before I came to this piece. When I learned York’s history, brought to life in startling detail, I couldn’t help but question whether his death could be morally justified, and an even further layer is added to this dilemma in that, all along, all he actually wants to do is die. Such dilemmas and their communication here have had a lasting impact, and overall this was a raw and brave production from a company with real potential.