In this four-hour durational performance, Etchells and Orazbayeva perform simultaneously. Staged in a side room off the main space at the Drill Hall in a long thin space, Seeping Through placed the audience along one long side with the performers along the other long side. This made it difficult to enter or leave the space surreptitiously, and so the coming and going of audience members seemed to form part of the performance.

Tim reads aloud, repeating words and phrases from cue cards and the occasional A4 piece of paper while walking from side to side or sitting. Aisha uses her violin to create sounds, noises, and occasionally music. Tim Etchells chooses a phrase and then spends some minutes vocally exploring the variations of inflection, pace, intonation and meaning of the phrase. Sometimes he allows the phrase to evolve, changing the word ‘my’ into the word ‘your’ for example, and uses his right arm and hand to fling the words out, away, into the audience. Aisha explores the potential of her instrument, the violin and the bow, her fingers and loose horsehair to create a series of sounds. Sometimes as the volume rises or a rhythm emerges from her activities, Tim responds, but mostly they seem to be in their own worlds of performance.

Etchells never seemed to be all that comfortable with what he was doing, sometimes struggling to keep going. The final half hour saw Tim glancing more and more often at the clock, finishing with five minutes of the phrase ‘keep it simple’. Aisha seemed more relaxed about her activity in her standard musician’s blacks, though never acknowledging the audience and hardly looking up at Tim. She seemed completely unaware of Tim’s clock watching and played beyond the 9pm finish time, allowing the sound to find its own natural conclusion. This was intriguingly abstract play, with flashes where meaning and music seeped through.

Surrounded by a string of lights on the floor, two performers with white painted faces and the red mouths and black eye details of clowns take turns reading out to one another a list of questions in this durational piece. ‘Would you like to stop?’ is the key to this game, to which an answer of ‘Yes’ means that the questionee becomes the questioner.

This format is surprisingly and effectively watchable. At first you wonder if there is a rule about answering honestly as Terry O’Connor seems to be doing her best to answer each question to the best of her ability, but then you realise that each person has their own style, both in asking questions and answering them. There is a big ream of dog-eared A4 sheets of paper each with dozens of questions. After a couple of hours of Cathy Naden and Terry O’Connor, Richard Lowdon comes in with some beers to relieve Terry.

Cathy Naden is eminently watchable on stage, bringing an assured poise to her performance, relaxed yet with a remarkable attention to the moment and an assured stagecraft. Terry O’Connor, in contrast, seems vulnerable, a little crumpled, and Cathy plays with this like a cat plays with a mouse, alternatively indulgent and then honing in on Terry’s instinct for honesty. Asking ‘What do you really want?’ repeatedly, waiting for the answer Terry seems to be seeking to avoid. There’s a turn toward interrogation that runs as an intriguing undercurrent though the format. All the performers use the printed questions as only a loose prompt for further improvised questionings, and when the questioner occasionally strays into statement it is only for a moment as the structure of asker/answerer is what makes this durational piece what it is. When O’Connor is replaced with Lowdon the energy of the piece shifts and becomes harsher, more competitive. The energies are subtly shifted and Richard’s questions sometimes seem accusations to which Cathy responds with assured humour and aplomb. Longer imaginative connected questioning occurs and there is a hilarious riff about a cheap package holiday in Hell. Quizoola! is an inspired format – a kind of Christmas party game turned into a durational performance – but what makes it work and watchable is the quality of the performers.

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.

It doesn’t get much more intimate than this. A small, informally constructed kitchen set, cast in an otherwise anonymous working space. A small audience squeezed tightly into two rows of benches. In the shadows behind the bench, composer John Harris, armed with a laptop and a DX7, stirs the air and subtly increases the tension with a palette of undulating drones peppered with light, high frequency fizzes. The drone and hiss remain in place albeit shifting in and out of focus throughout this short, intense performance.

A man, a woman, and an apple tree. A familiar combination of historic consequence, but the events here take place far from Eden.  Jane sits all day in the stifling heat of a shabby home. Her husband, Mac, is increasingly desperate about his work, and, consequently, their future.

The setting is in a future where economics have failed, heat is rising and vegetation of any kind is rare. So what, then, to make of a bump in the linoleum flooring that transpires to be a green sapling growing through the floor?

Is it real? Do they both see the same thing? Is this a manifestation of Jane’s depression, taking on a hallucinatory tangibility? Is there really any hope to be had from this new growth, or has something gone too far?

Originally a play, Zinnie Harris, under commission from the Sound Festival, has boiled the narrative into an intense libretto, and within the irregular undulations of John Harris’s score the dialogue, between two people struggling against an inevitably tragic denouement, drifts from spoken word to song, often in the midst of a single line – and frequently with tragi-comic impact.

It is somewhat troubling to observe that the depiction of the future as a hopeless, overheated, poisoned eventuality has grown, in itself, somewhat banal, and there is little here that adds any particularly fresh insight into that sad state of affairs. However, Alan McHugh and Pauline Knowles occupy their characters with a raw and hurt despair that it is impossible not to be moved by the evocation of how a societal carelessness and neglect turns full circle on itself affording the space for individuals to career helplessly towards self-destruction. There really is no way back to the garden.