A lone man balances atop a cylindrical tube of rolled up dance floor 5ft high. He needs to concentrate – the task is ruling him. He tips forward and leaps to the ground, the tube crashing behind him. The man assesses the situation and continues to set up another balancing act.

Douglas is a musing on realness, everyday objects, and balance. It’s an experiment in physics and a platform for choreographer and performer Robbie Synge to play. Synge sets up a series of elaborate balancing acts with chairs, rope, his dance floor, and theatre lights before crashing into them and watching them fall. Quietly humorous, it reminded me of playing with a five year old – building a precarious castle out of building blocks and whatever else you can find and then revelling in the moment of destroying it.

A rope is tied around a pole, and attached to a chair with a light on it, which in turn is attached to Synge’s body. He lets it take his weight, more, more, more; before the balance is tipped in the wrong direction and he crashes to the ground, the light and chair going with him. An impressive sequence sees Synge balance on the tube of dance floor as it slowly unravels along the stage – he needs to work so hard to remain upright as it uncurls under his body weight. He sweats and sweats as he tirelessly attempts to achieve… what exactly? The elusiveness of the piece is both a frustration and a quiet joy. Part of me is desperately seeking meaning – is the piece about the trials of everyday task and toil, the emptiness of our continued attempts to achieve bizarre goals, or the joy of accepting that life is out of our hands? Who is Douglas? A brother? A lover? Or simply an object? Unassuming and practical, Douglas offers no easy answers – just real tasks, and a canvas for you to paint your own picture.

‘You never know what’s around the corner’ – this is the warning and lament that begins this tale of human pain from Ireland’s new writing company Fishamble. We’re in a dark underworld of black and gold. A slinky, androgynous body wrapped in dark, weed-like foliage slinks across the stage, his bright white eyes glinting out from a splash of golden paint. Writer and performer Pat Kivenane has concocted a deathly black comedy that shimmers with an eerie undertone of broken humanity, expertly directed by Jim Culleton.

Underneath tells the story of a woman who has been ostracized from mainstream society. It’s a simple tale of bullying turned violent, of prejudice and the brutality of small-mindedness. What makes this stand out from similar stories is Kivenane’s writing and his razor sharp, surprising performance. He chats to us in a thick Cork accent, making friends with two audience members to whom he constantly refers throughout the entire piece. It’s as if we’re sitting in his living room having a cup of tea and he’s telling us about going to the shops. Except the story leaps from disturbing tales of the prostitutes (who he endearingly nicknames Aldi & Lidl), our protagonist’s mutilation from horrific burns and how the foxes flip mice into the air as they savage them.  His physical embodiment of this broken character is outstandingly vivid. His body ripples with pain as he twists himself into the frequent bursts of horrified memory of his suffering.

It’s is both a suspenseful storytelling and a meditation on the inevitable cruelty of human existence. As our unnamed heroine’s tale races towards the inevitable, Kivenane breaks out into anecdotes about pop culture – trying to comprehend why people give a shit about ‘Downton Fucking Abbey’ and re-enacting scenes from A Place in the Sun in which a couple search for 30 years for their perfect home. He had me in stitches.

As we learn of our heroine’s fate, we’re asked to consider how we might die; to confront the fact that we have no clue what’s coming next – maybe we’ll get a smack of a Volvo or choke on a Quality Street. The biting humour gives way to surprising honesty as Kivenane pleas with us never to walk down the street without sending positive thoughts to the people passing us by – ‘you never know how lonely they might be’.  Hidden under the gold cloak and hilarious text, Underneath urges us to be better people, to put a halt to snap judgments and remember that while we’re alive we desperately need humanity to keep us going.

To be honest I don’t quite know how to write about A Game of You without giving said game away. And that would utterly spoil the experience for you… but I can share a flavour of this craftily brilliant piece of work.

The experience is the third in the company’s acclaimed series of works that explore the personal, following After the Smile Off Your Face and Internal. Based in Ghent, the company comprises six performers and technician Bebette Poncelet – although you will only meet two or three of this team. We enter a cosy, red-curtained little enclave one at a time, in intervals of five minutes. Facing a mirror, I am immediately faced with my own reflection (how is my hair?) and faced with decisions to make. Should I touch the plastic dolls or the lamp? Should I write on the notepad? I stay in my seat. A man enters and takes his seat next to me. He tells me that the plastic doll reminds him of his ex-boyfriend, but he has to leave him behind in order to move on with his life. But he’s talking about himself too much – after all, this is about me.

I’m invited to walk through the curtain… One of the pleasures of the experience is the not knowing. It would be completely different with pre-knowledge, as it requires your honesty and an ability to be in the moment. It compels your gut reactions and tests your openness and/or guardedness. It gently interrogates how well you know yourself and how you see yourself. It revels in our discomfort when asked to look at ourselves directly. It demands that for a few moments (the piece is only half an hour long) we take some time to cross-examine how we think we appear to others and how we feel about that.

As well as probing the concept of the self, it plays with our prejudices and ability to make surface decisions about those strangers we happen to end up talking to – or simply judging from afar. This set-up is not as deftly considered as the more personal elements but it does result in a charming token to take away with you and cherish and/or burn! The entire enterprise is masterfully crafted. The technical and logistical achievement is as remarkable as the extremely impressive performances – the cast never has a moment to sit back in the knowledge that they know what they are doing. It is an utterly live experience, and cannot exist without us. After all – this is all about you…

This is the second production inspired by Frida Kahlo that I’ve seen this summer. The first, The Four Fridas, was an enormous spectacle put together by Greenwich & Docklands International Festival’s Bradley Hemmings. It included a mesmerising and moving flight of the Voladores. Caroline Bowditch’s piece is the opposite in scale – intimate and friendly – but equally resonant, exploring the marks we leave on the world we exist in.

Bowditch has fallen head over heels for Frida. Or is it that she’s fallen head over heels for the idea of Frida? Or that Frida’s life and work resonate with her so much that she has fallen in love with the story of Frida? Over sixty minutes she charmingly chats to us about her life and how her discovery of Kahlo’s work and biography has inspired this performance – and continues to inspire her life. Kahlo was severely injured in a bus accident as a young woman, including a broken spinal cord that rendered her immobile for three months. We meet Bowditch lying on a bright yellow table listening to the music Frida played at home. She is joined on stage by two beguiling dancers, dressed in signature bright Kahlo colours. The three women dance together and alone, conjuring images of confidence and courage to isolation and nerves. The movement is fluid and with clean lines and soft shapes. It is performed with rich emotion.

We fall in love with Caroline, Frida’s story fading into the distance as she charismatically regales us with hilarious anecdotes and touching love stories. We hear about her attending a conference for little people at which she hooks up with a ‘tall’ woman and has a fantastically rich love affair. We are given shots of tequila and collectively down them. She receives a voicemail from an old teacher who has seen her on the news – utterly astounded by Caroline’s achievements in this world.

The entire piece is full of heart and soul. It’s the word ‘love’ in the title that carries the idea of our legacy from the top of the show and onto the evening street. On our way out we’re handed postcards and urged to send them to someone we love. Surely that’s how we will be remembered – the loves in our lives and the people we touch. I’m glad to have been touched, very gently, by Caroline Bowditch.

Three bright white slabs hover above a pitch black floor – isolated, yet full of potential. Fred Meller’s stark design beautifully compliments Stef Smith’s new play Swallow, which follows three women as they fiercely navigate a moment in their lives when they feel utterly alone. A slim door that rotates is the only other set piece onstage. It fills with bright white light that flickers to orange to blue to green. This door seems to embody the blood running through our protagonists’ veins. And it keeps them away from each other– a perfect metaphor for Smith’s heartbreaking tale of these women on the verge of forever keeping the door locked.

Rebecca’s husband has abandoned her for another woman, leaving her devastated; Sam is struggling to look in the mirror and accept that she needs to live life as a man; Anna has locked herself in her flat and is violently tearing it apart – the pain of life has overwhelmed her once too many times.

With echoes of Sarah Kane’s work, Smith presents three monologues that seamlessly join together for intimate exchanges between the three women as their lives become interconnected. It’s not the most striking of set-ups, but Smith’s writing fizzes with wit and human insight. I truly cared for these women.

Orla O’Loughlin directs her compelling cast with precision and drive. Her production cleverly strips anything unnecessary away – O’Loughlin focuses us on Anna, Rebecca and Sam, and the immediacy of their experiences captivates. All three performances are alternately touching, insightful, and hilarious. The play is about humanity and the ability for life to completely overwhelm us. We see ourselves in these characters – we see our wives, sisters, friends, colleagues – and the tremendous pain that goes hand in hand with human exchange and connection. Anna, Rebecca, and Sam are all at a point where the pain is so vivid that barricading yourself in a room, smashing your phone and any other form of communication seems the only answer. Is it just too painful to even begin form another relationship? Swallow urges us to understand these moments of extreme despair, hold out a hand and make that leap to carry on.