Focus Group is an adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s short story Mister Squishy, and follows protagonist Terry (Terry O’Donovan) as he reaches toward his sense of aggrieved occlusion. We, the audience, have been invited to participate in a focus group, carried out by Terry’s market research company on behalf of a major cake manufacturer (in the short story this is the titular Mister Squishy, for the play it is the ubiquitous Mr. Kipling).

Focus Group opens, like its source text, in mid-flow, with corporate types playing ping pong in their office. Augmenting the game is the everyday negotiation that goes on between colleagues – and those who want to be more than colleagues – shouted across the table with every swing of the paddle. The audience following this are seated across from each other, much like in an actual tennis match, in bleacher type seating on either side of the performance space.

In between the central performance of rec room interactions, wordless montages, abstract tableaux, microwave meals for one, and actors hovering on the sidelines wearing a tiger’s head, the audience do actually participate in a parody of a focus group. The need for the audience to commit to this is stressed, although it seems likely that blank-faced silence from us would result in exactly the same show.  We are played off against each other on either side, with the main character addressing one half while one of his colleagues talks about him to the other half. That creeping notion that everyone is discussing you and laughing at you behind your back? Oh, it’s true.  Meanwhile, the back and forth of the ping pong games highlights the protagonist’s utter inability to connect with other humans – whether as friends or lovers. He’s just firing words at people across a room and expecting something more than more words in return.

Certain sequences presenting snapshots into the characters’ inner lives are well choreographed and artfully framed, presenting unguarded moments of tranquility and boredom and despair. Some are literal: a woman curls up in a chair and quietly reads a book, a man chooses between shirts. Others imaginary: Terry’s alpha-male colleague and rival pinned under the board room table, a concoction being brewed in a home lab. The montage technique gives a strong sense of the passing of time, and lends some much-needed lyricism to the bright yet brittle fakery of the rest of the action. The significance of the tiger head never becomes explicit.

The participatory element of the experience has the potential to be funny or awkward, with very little lead given by the cast. The answers elicited from the group are never incorporated, or even referenced again, so it feels like those parts might as well be scripted, or not happen at all.  Asides do highlight just how meaningless the story’s focus groups are, though. (We learn that the fictional company our characters work for carefully targets its participants and keeps asking the questions till they get the results their client wants). It’s a taste of the futility the protagonist feels at attempting individuality in the corporate machine.

The format is a break from convention, but at heart this is yet another story of a disaffected straight white man who feels betrayed by the sense of entitlement society has bestowed upon him. The plot twist is delivered so calmly and casually that it would be chilling if it hadn’t been so clearly signposted; that inevitability of outcome though, the inescapable subsuming of self within any socially-acceptable parameters, is at the very heart of the source material, so in that respect Focus Group hits its mark. An ostensibly flippant hour of theatre with a sobering undercurrent which we only glimpse throughout, until it breaks through at the last.

I had quite a few expectations going into Made Visible, but I wasn’t anticipating that it would be wry, and funny. The humour is the play’s saving grace as it retreads a conversation which in real life often threatens to disappear up its own handwringing white angst. In short, it is a dramatisation of a conversation writer Deborah Pearson had with a stranger on a park bench. A stranger who happened to be an older Asian woman in a sari. Beyond that, it’s a discussion about how white people don’t know how to talk about racism. There are endless reams of discourse about race. About interaction between races. About our involuntary racism. About the invisibility of whiteness. The crisis of how to say something meaningful about all that is the issue to which the play addresses itself.

Deborah Pearson’s incredibly self-aware play – a text in constant debate with itself, questioning the validity of its own existence – doesn’t exactly say anything new, but it does interrogate what we already know (whether we admit it or not) and it does manage, through showing or by stating all those things we tell ourselves about why we react to people the way we do, to trick its characters into being inadvertently honest. Pearson is known for her commitment to fringe theatre and has been nominated for a Total Theatre Innovation Award (and won many others) and she has been listed as one of the most influential people in UK theatre – so this is a woman with a voice, who knows she can be heard, and that context is very relevant when looking at who gets to speak and how much during Made Visible. (Spoiler: For once it isn’t the middle class white people.) Furthermore, she has written on the politics of narrative in theatre, so presenting her thoughts in this way is a very considered choice, calculated to be culturally effective.

An awareness of context makes the experience of Made Visible richer. Understanding the conversation Pearson is portraying allows us to laugh at the tropes, at the rhetorical knots people will tie themselves in to avoid saying the wrong thing, and the awful platitudes people come out with when confronted with a race or culture they’re not entirely familiar or comfortable with. The two Asian actors often seemingly stroll out of the fourth wall to interrogate the ‘Deborah’ character and the text – a device that belies Pearson’s own thought process in justifying putting this play on in the first place. It’s satisfying to see many of my objections to or quibbles with the main text acknowledged by the people within the Made Visible world and examined if not resolved.

One of the most interesting things the ‘Deborah’ character says as she tries to justify her play to the other actors onstage is that maybe the central event, the conversation with a stranger on a bench, was significant to that woman too because she didn’t often have an in-depth interaction with young white women. From this misplaced but not entirely unreasonable starting notion, she escalates out to the idea that ethnic minorities can ostracise and even dominate white people. That classic false equivalence is the very thing that derails every equality argument time and again, the idea that an exploited group kicking back at a dominant group is ‘the same thing’ as the systemic oppression they have faced for however many generations. It is a comforting argument for people who resent anyone trying to acquire what they have by virtue of birth, but also to people who feel guilty about having what others do not but don’t know how to rectify it. Recognising this and portraying it in a way we can laugh along with whilst still seeing the fallacy is the true success of Made Visible.

Actors of different races, cast to play race-specific roles, switching characters mid-show isn’t a groundbreaking device, but it was unexpected and effective. I felt more comfortable hearing an Asian woman recounting a story about being a white woman who is suspicious of some Middle Eastern men on a plane than I would have been hearing it from a woman I was reading as white, which was probably the point. The voices of white people always dominate conversations on race – their experiences and observations intrinsically deemed more valid than those of ethnic minorities. Pearson has clearly taken this on board and made the choice to give the voice to characters other than her own onstage proxy. They are still speaking her words though, that is the crux.

A few notes on the production: The lighting design is spare and stark and it’s effective. It’s married carefully with design to lead us into and out of ‘the play’ and the meta-world of self-reprobation and cross examination that frames it. The set is storybook tokenistic and quite charming, lending a whimsical air to the environment. The exposed wings, the brilliant white brick walls of the Yard (a nightmare to light but entirely appropriate for this piece), lurid coloured LED strips and the set of bold Perspex flats and parodic mocked-up park benches and pond create the ideal environment for a chronically meta-analytical piece of theatre about exposing hidden truths and self-examination. The space was perfectly suited to the content, so much so that it could almost be site-responsive. It will be interesting to see how Made Visible fares in other venues.

The subject matter is familiar and a solution isn’t really forthcoming (could it be?), but the execution is warmly self-critical and genuinely funny, enough so that the inherent egotism of making a play about how you feel about being white can still make for an entertaining hour.

Something Something Lazarus, a title you always have to confirm is the actual title whenever you talk about it, is ostensibly a musical, but one which interrupts its form.  The show is structured around the Midnight Sun, an ailing cabaret club, and a setting much like the King’s Head venue it takes place in. The rehearsals of songs about something (resurrection, for example), become a hyper-symbolic dreamscape where the singing of the song is the action itself. (Say, raising the dead. For example.) The music is intrinsic to the characters and their interactions, it is their language and does more than sound pleasing – as much as dance is more than just movement and tells more than a story. Unlike a traditional musical Lazarus seeks to disrupt narrative, and neat segues, and present something confrontational.

Much of the music is almost-familiar and, like all good cabaret, highly referential. It felt like the headliner should be a jaded, ageing drag artist to truly embody the spirit of the place. The eponymous broken cabaret itself (performed inside sugar-daddy club-owner Daniel’s head) is akin to Jonathan Larson or John Cameron Mitchell as directed by David Lynch, and complimentary Elaine Paige stickers adorn the patron’s chests. So much of Something Something Lazarus, when it moves on from the slightly stilted realism of the introductory scene, feels like someone trying to scratch an idea out of their head, like a composer noodling on their piano, an artist furiously sketching pages and tearing each one off onto a pile on the floor, already scribbling on the next clean sheet with the impressions of the one before scarring the paper, and as young agitator Jay tells us when a scene doesn’t quite go to plan ‘this is cabaret. If you wanted the Royal Court you should have fucking gone there.’ Quite.

It does take too long to get going, to launch into its main conceit, but once it does I was consistently thrilled.  The set pieces and narrative devices are maybe not as innovative as the company might like to think, but they are compellingly executed. The majority of the music is performed by the cast and the arrangements and musical direction are the true strength of Something Something Lazarus and the element that really sets it apart from its contemporaries. Setting a show inside a character’s head allows for philosophical abstraction. Using time as a structuring device and conveying it in literal and metaphorical ways, yes these are things we have seen, things which work – but what really elevates this play, and the sometimes carelessly written dialogue, is the way music saturates every interaction. You know the way a song can make you feel like you’re in a story, the swell of possibility in your chest as you listen to something that speaks to you? Here that singular and personal experience is made manifest and accessible as a shared moment – a liminal moment, stretched out beyond the seconds it occurs for and into the virtual. Despite the tension of the narrative, when the full company perform an ever-escalating, passion-revealing number together, it borders on euphoric.

The raw aspects, carefully orchestrated though most of them are, feel honest despite the subterfuge and the encyclopaedia of unspoken tensions and resentments and loves and disappointments. The character who seems the most superficial and vain transpires to be the most emotionally developed in a world where, as the song tells us ‘Every heart ends up as meat.’

However, the artifice of the production is paradoxically highlighted by the life given to the characters outside of the tiny back room of the King’s Head. The world of the Midnight Sun extends far beyond the scope of that humid performance space into the potentially infinite online.  In a concept they’ve ambitiously dubbed ‘transmedia’, Broken Cabaret have given their production a presence in the real (virtual) world. Their characters have personas, on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, the club has a fully functional website. To the producers this seems to be the most important facet of what sets Lazarus apart, and while that additional dimension was definitely entertaining, the production certainly stands without it. Which is fortunate as it seemed a number of the audience, certainly on the night I attended, were not aware of the wealth of supplementary online material.

The climactic musical number, a multilayered, multi-instrumental tennis match, Duelling Banjos with lives at stake, is funny and fraught and musically accomplished and honestly everything I could want from cabaret.  From the first note of this song I was rapt.  It was supported by a brilliant lighting design that created depth in a few square feet of floor and made judicious use of strobe. The isolated but perfectly pitched instances of choreography complemented the themes of time and control – and the escalation of both drama and musicality – faultlessly. The sparing use of clearly choreographed movement is a mature and effective choice and when the cast are transfigured into ticking automata before spiralling into something far more primal, it is rightly rewarding.

My only real criticism is that the show ends so abruptly. That jagged edge needs either polishing or sharpening somehow. I don’t think Something Something Lazarus has quite arrived yet, but it is undoubtedly going somewhere and I’ll be back to see it happen.

Grace Savage is many things: person, woman, performer, actor, beatboxer. Repeat British Champion Beatboxer to be precise. She is the sum of her parts and so is her one-woman theatrical debut Blind, created with female-led devising company The Paper Birds, and originally premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe 2014. This is a mostly-autobiographical collection of re-enacted memories, history lessons in vocal music making, beatbox masterclass, and an exploration of what it means for a young woman to find her identity in Britain today.

The opening sequence is a tongue-in-cheek riposte to years of predictable and thoughtless questioning directed at a woman in yet another man’s world. A female beatboxer is apparently still a novelty and the l’esprit d’escalier of making a clever sarcastic response is finally realised for Grace Savage as the shadow of her mother sells a percussive baby Grace to the circus. The sequence could definitely benefit from some amplification, but Savage has an impressive ability to fill the space with her voice.

It’s gentle fun and although I felt the shadow was too obscured and the pacing wasn’t yet established, the rest of the audience took to the joke enthusiastically and Grace running out to sample the applause on her mixing desk was a winning touch. This unorthodox and concrete twist on audience participation – a device used again later in the show – lent an air of collaboration to the experience and given that the main theme is about finding and using your voice, this is a satisfying routine, well played by Savage.

There is an unpolished air to proceedings that may speak of Savage’s inexperience at formal, rehearsed acting and speaking, but there is no doubt she is an accomplished beatboxer and confident performer. She shows promising aptitude for structure and employing narrative tools: an ebullient and innocent teenage scene, played mostly for laughs (though that laugh does trail off into unease as the play-fear becomes too authentic) is chillingly referenced in the account of a brutal scene years later, and is all the more powerful for its echo of playful youth.

The pacing of Blind is measured. With a beat of deliberate humour at the end of every bar it feels like the jazz Savage references: improvised (or at least unrefined) but within clear parameters, the time signature tested but never transcended.

The ‘camera’ trick – imitating a flashbulb sound with a mouthful of powder – might have been a nice touch if she’d continued to produce the effects for other items throughout – but alone it was a slightly incongruous gimmick. I did appreciate the simplicity of set design and sparing use of props. Grace Savage is the story and the star; she doesn’t need to hide behind flashy crutches.

The real substance of the show is the more or less autobiographical re-enactment of Grace Savage’s defining moments. Not just definitive in fact, but formative, to UK championships from the mundane reality of a quiet Devon upbringing.

Amongst many clever notes and pleasing touches, the stand out moment in Blind is the ears-only section which gives the show its title. It starts off as a silly game, the audience blindfolded listening to a woman imitate a drum machine. It’s harmless fun that ends with chills and goosebumps – there’s no doubt Savage is an accomplished performer and the delivery at that point shifted the mood in the room on a sixpence.

The trick of referring back to those light-hearted childhood memories is put to good use more than once too: a précis of the major world events of the late 90s and early 2000s, ‘The News As Heard By Me’, is a neat little party trick, but when it is referenced in the rousing climax of the performance, suddenly she’s literally shouting through the static to claim her identity, to be heard, to be seen and that’s a story most of us can relate to.

Grace Savage is a personable and engaging performer. Proficient beatboxer and budding raconteur. You might not agree with everything she has to say, but you’re going to want to hear it.