This performance recaptures the intense interest in space, rockets and science of the late 1960s for an audience of children who won’t remember it and adults who might. A simple set of two half circles, one vertical backdrop, and one horizontal floor, with a raised centre area decorated with planetary formations, creates the playing area for the two performers who sit waiting patiently onstage for the audience to settle. Suddenly with a voiceover rocket-launch-style countdown we’re off into the life of Alfie White, a schoolboy who is obsessed with space, on a mission to find his Dad with the help of his friend Meg. While Jordan Turner plays Alfie throughout the piece with a lanky precision, it’s up to his co-performer Lucy Tuck to play every other character in the performance. Lucy manages to find a voice and physicality for all of the various roles in the show, keeping the well worked out plot rolling along.

There are some wonderful set pieces of 60s music, physical performance, and science geekery. Harking back as it does to a pre-digital age with vinyl records, the space race, and early pop music, this show could have easily been hard for today’s children to understand, but Tall Stories’ storytelling by Olivia Jacobs and Toby Mitchell effectively captures the attention of older children with its sense of family and mystery.

BLAM! is set in a mundane office where four employees are as bored with their tedious lives as anyone in their shoes would be. That is where anything usual or tedious about this Danish production, returning to the fringe after a sell-out run in 2013, ends. At first, hints of creativity and playfulness from the workers peep through, in short flashes. They use office supplies to invent action-packed worlds for a few moments at a time before returning to their monotonous office routines. BLAM! takes its time letting us get to know the distinct personalities of the four workers – the boss, the showoff, the nerd, the usual guy. And then, to steal a phrase, ‘BLAM!’, the snippets transform into a full-blown action adventure on the scale of Diehard, The Matrix, or T2: Judgment Day.

Director and creator Kristján Ingimarsson and the company have spared no detail in this carefully crafted romp of insanity. The four performers repurpose every object you would find in an office, transforming them into high-flying, careening, walloping, pulverizing WHAM, BAM, action-adventure glory. The genius of their physical gags, acrobatics, and object use offer constant surprise as they build minute by minute. Finally, when it seems like the show has blammed all there is to blam, BLAM! takes us on a journey of such insane proportions it’s difficult to believe that it all occurred live inside a theatre with only four guys and some office supplies.

For fans of action adventure, flips and tricks, machine guns and glory, or playful physical comedy, BLAM! unabashedly delivers a wild theatrical experience you have surely never imagined. The company has taken a high pedigree of skill in theatre, comedy, and acrobatics, and given their full capacity to invent pure mayhem on a scale I have never seen so expertly and precisely mounted in a theatre production. For those who like a little story, don’t worry, there is love, tragedy, heartbreak, friendship, and a poker scene with subtle touches of physical theatre finesse.

Across the landscape of work at this year’s fringe, BLAM! offers the sort of adrenaline-pumped escapism that you would usually only find in the megaplex. The show might feel like it’s short on artistic depth… but in fact it manages to capture subtlety in its expert use of diverse theatre and circus forms, and, well, it’s so much fun!

Self and Others by Formosa Circus Arts, and part of the Taiwan Season at Fringe, presents a blend of circus, theatre, and dance. The company works unusually for a circus, preferring to focus on group dynamics, dance, and texture, instead of individual virtuosity. Each performer wears the same minimal costume in rather consistently dim lighting to create an effect of a singular whole that morphs and moves through space. This ensemble focus generates many of both the strengths and weaknesses of Self and Others.

In their opening image, one of the performers emerges balanced in a handstand on top of an amorphous gloop where limbs appear to be far more numerous than people. The beautiful image of the mass is captivating, and repeats in a variety of formations throughout the show. The weakness, however, came through in individual skill as the performer in the handstand at the top of the mass never actually managed to press into a handstand. Instead, he managed to balance with bent arms momentarily before returning to the ground. Initially, I wondered if this could be attributed to style, but they continued to attempt handstands and balances in various formations, and frequently fell, struggled, or missed. This muddiness in acrobatic skill carried over to other turns that emerged beautifully out of ensemble movement, only to be executed in a clunky finale. It is also worth noting that the recorded music accompanying these feats was uneven – sometimes lending a soft eeriness that enhanced their shape-shifting, but at other times striking repeated harsh tones that seemed at odds with the nature of the movement, and were sometimes difficult to endure.

Some of the stronger material included some evocative play with light; ensemble silks images that transformed into small characters; and ensemble dance with wood blocks to create a powerful soundscape and numerous visual images. The collective invention of imagery was consistently striking, and laid a foundation that left me curious about what can emerge come from their continued creative exploration. Formosa Circus Arts is a young company (only four years old), and they show great promise. But though I look forward to seeing what they come up with next, it isn’t fully realised here.

This piece, squeezed into a corner of a tiny space on the Royal Mile with six chairs, a projection screen and a square of green fake grass taped to the floor, begins straightforwardly, with six young men and women reading out the communications between them in their preparations for the play. Their ambition is to re-stage 1985’s notorious ‘Battle of the Beanfield’ where several hundred New Age travellers were attacked by riot police and arrested in an attempt to prevent the Stonehenge Free Festival from taking place. The travellers suffered massive damage to their bodies and property and were all later released without charge.

The young company link this storytelling to their own experiences of being sprayed with CS gas by police at Warwick University during 2014’s sit-in protest against tuition fees. They mix video of interviews with people who were there in 1985, and their own attempts to stage the events on location, with well written second-person descriptions of going to a present day Stonehenge celebration. The resulting cocktail contains so much information and emotion it gives you a huge amount to think about, and is powerful enough to stay with you for some time. This is an honest and searing piece that gives you an insight into the political awakening of a generation of young people, growing up and trying to make sense of a world where brutal oppression by state authorities lurks underneath the apparent freedoms our current society affords.

Disguising their project as ‘historical reenactment’ the company contact a reenactment society to ask how to stage a battle in which a group of armed thugs beat up a group of defenceless families. The response from the society turns out to be correct – why would you want to, when it is simply upsetting to do, to watch and for those at the time, experience. However this group of six manage to create here a powerful and affecting piece of theatre that attempts to deal with, and recover from, unnecessary trauma, without hiding or excusing the human brutality we are capable of.