She no longer wants to talk about getting stripped; she now wants to talk about getting dressed. She sits behind a sewing machine, her lit face rapt in concentration, her beautiful pre-Raphaelite auburn curls falling forward. The machine judders along. ‘Wearing clothes I have made is the most honest way I have of being in the world.’

Lydia Higginson is a dress designer. She used to be a costume designer, and once made three ultra-theatrical outfits for her three best friends – a cheery clown suit for Josie, a feisty flapper outfit for Olivia, and a pretty pink prom-queen number for Nobahar. They were outfits for a show never made – except now the four school friends are back together making the show.

But it’s a different show to what might have been. Not long after making those costumes, when she was just 19 and travelling overseas on her gap year, Lydia was stripped, beaten and sexually assaulted by a gang of ten men who broke into the house she was staying in. We learn that when Lydia returned home to the UK, she vowed to replace every item in her wardrobe with something new she’d made for herself. This literal re-dressing became her healing tool.

She later approached her old school friend Josie Dale-Jones, an emerging theatre-maker and founder of ThisEgg, to ask if she might want to make a show about ‘the robbery’ (which is how Lydia refers to the attack). The process of decision-making finds its way into the final show: Will I be seen as attention-grabbing, asks Lydia. Do I want my life on display in this way? She is cool and calm in her re-telling of the horrible facts of the assault – this low-key delivery far more affecting than any emotive ‘acting’ might be.

Having decided she would take up the challenge, Josie persuaded Lydia to be in it, and from there it soon become obvious that dancer Liv (Olivia Norris) and singer Nobahar (Mahdavi) ought to be too.

Those original fantastical costumes become both a vehicle for exploring the archetypal characters that might have been in that non-existent show, and an ironic commentary on lost innocence. They are Showgirls – the name of a song sung by Nobahar, one of her own compositions. Choreography for the show is by Olivia, and of course costumes by Lydia.

But there are other clothes here too. Black dance outfits peeled back to reveal naked backs – spines – that offer support to each other. At one point, there’s a heap of clothes lying on the floor, Lydia lying in them like a quivering bird in a nest, as Nobahar sings to her gently. And one by one, all four don beautiful wild-silk dresses – teal and old-gold and rust and blue-grey – in which the girls take on the mantel of grown women, strong and proud in their very different feminine identities, happily dancing in a line, echoing the opening image of the four giving us their schoolgirl dance class routine.

This is an extraordinarily skilled piece of theatre from such a young company. Yes, ThisEgg’s founder/director Josie is the daughter of Hoipolloi’s Dale Shon-Jones and Stefanie Mueller – and Mueller is credited with stage design for the show, so we could argue that not only is theatre in her blood, she has had a strong helping hand too. But that is by-the-by – a case of just making use of what you have available, as anyone would. And no amount of parental support can grant you talent. This show has been created and realised by these four young women, they own it, and it bears the mark not only of their united talents in theatre-making, dance, music and costume design, but also the real-life love for each other that is at the heart of the work.

For anyone who saw and loved the feel-good romps Cantina or Scotch & Soda, or the clever homage to circus tradition She Would Walk the Sky, the news that the creator of these shows, Company 2, were now making a piece inspired by Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground might be received with alarm. But fear not, Sediment is a beautiful and accessible piece of circus-theatre, reprising many favourite motifs from the company’s previous work, including breathtaking hand-to-hand routines, angsty battle-of-the-sexes apache-dance encounters, and even the old favourite bottle-walking act…

The show is more a ‘response to’ than a ‘version of’ Dostoevsky’s novella. Notes from the Underground is only really there as a catalyst, a bringer of ideas to the table – ideas that include the notion of the unreliable narrator; the plight of modern man (and here I do mean ‘man’ not ‘human’) perplexed by the ways of the world; the obsession with – and the fear of – the desired encounter with the object of desire; the constant torment of imagination and memory intruding upon the present moment.

Here’s how this plays out in Sediment…

The immensely talented David Carberry is ‘the man’. We first meet him wriggling and twitching and flinching in a chair centre-stage. To his left, an old upright piano, to his right a vintage TV set, the screen displaying fizzing black-and-white lines and a white-noise hum.

Behind a gauze screen, the desirable ‘other’ (Alice Muntz) is seen in silhouette, a Lottie Reiniger cut-out in layered lace petticoat and camisole, slowly twirling her hoop. As the two come together for the first of many beautiful duets, she continues to hoop as he does all he can to break into her circle. He fails, but manages to lift her by one foot, as she continues to hoop without even a moment’s pause with hardly any acknowledgement of his presence, other than occasionally swatting him away as if he were an annoying fly. Such skilled choreography!  It’s gorgeously low-key in tone, whilst being simultaneously immensely highly skilled, something of a trait of this show. Choreography is credited to Chelsea McGuffin, who with Carberry is co-director of Company 2. – Carberry gets a director credit, with Muntz listed as co-performer and co-creator, so we’ll just applaud everything on show in Sediment as a wonderful joint effort.

Now she’s tearing sheets of paper – poems or letters, perhaps even Dostoevsky’s own writing – and with each rip, his body responds as if it is itself being torn. As their relationship develops – although always with a push-and-pull, they never fully acquiesce to each other – we are treated to some of most fluid and sensuous dance-circus duets you’re likely to see.

And sound, used so cleverly to drive the dramaturgy of the show. Recorded: the hiss of the TV, the crackles of an old record player, the soft notes of vintage jazz, an old Music Hall classic, a cowgirl waltz. Live: the clatter of a typewriter, a strummed guitar and prepared piano (him), a zither (her). And a minimal amount of spoken text, used for its rhythm and musicality: ‘You wrote…’ ’You wrote me a letter… ‘ ‘You wrote me a letter and I… ‘ ’You wrote me a letter and I keep it in a box beside my bed.’ Delivered by her as he continuously pulls the microphone from her.

We never know quite where we are – the past, the present, inside his head? – but rather than this being confusing, it creates a dream-like, layered and nuanced stage world in which memory and imagination are as real as anything else. And the inanimate objects in this world – the musical instruments, typewriters, papers, bottles, hoop, trapeze – exist as things with magical, fetishistic qualities to be fought over for possession. Often, the two communicate to each other via the objects rather than in a clear and direct physical relationship. Existential angst and melancholic pathos permeate every scene, although often teamed with wry humour.

As for the circus turns: there is a great deal of pure unadulterated top-notch circus skill on display – including some of the best hand-to-hand work currently on show at the Fringe or indeed anywhere else – and there is also much usurping of expectations. A Saw the Lady in Half act which starts with the lady sawing herself in half, and ends – well, let’s just say in an unexpected manner. A solo trapeze number from Carberry in which he appears to fall, to land in stillness in a toe-hang, just inches from the ground, looking all the world like a hanged man, and enters into a kind of battle with the trapeze, ducking under and over it; and an absolutely gorgeous soft-shoe shuffle inspired ‘rubber legs’ sand dance, also Carberry.

Although both he and Alice Muntz are brilliant, it is David Carberry’s show – he had the original idea, and Sediment is in many ways a showcase for his phenomenal talents as a contemporary circus performer. It is a great achievement, very different in atmosphere (if not in skills) to the company’s  previous work – a truly surprising and inspiring circus-theatre show.

‘It seems that we may stop here.’

‘Marooned on a traffic island we can tyrannise ourselves, test our strengths and weaknesses, perhaps come to terms with aspects of our characters to which we have always closed our eyes.’ JG Ballard

The set is a white dance floor – a rectangle, not the whole space – and attached to it, an upright wire fence with a white screen behind it. A fixed, limited space. House lights down, sound up – the immense roar of traffic at high speed.  Monochrome projections imply, rather than realistically represent, images of vehicles racing by. Where are we? It could be any big city. Mexico. Sao Paulo. London. Let’s say it’s London. Next to or under the Westway, say.

Crash! Splintered, fragmented sounds. The noise of breaking glass and twisting metal, amplified and distorted, worked into the harsh electronic soundscape. A figure crashes into the space, landing with a great bang on the ground, at first just a bundle of limbs and clothes, black patent stiletto’d legs sticking out at an awkward angle.

The sound is intense, menacing, piercing right through us. Ever-evolving patterns of projected light startle us. The marriage of intense sound and image is reminiscent of the work of Ryoji Ikeda – it is in fact a creation of MHz, Bex Anson and Dav Bernard. The monochrome patterns of projected light are now sometimes slashed with harsh, sickly colours.

The body, in its black coat, and shiny black leggings, twists, turns, stands on its head, legs waving wildly in the air, giving it an odd insect-like appearance. It becomes more definitely a ‘she’ as she turns her distressed face to us, letting out roars of anger and panic. A woman. A young, Black woman. Yes, the gender / age /ethnicity is important to mention. She’s circled in acid yellow and electric blue. She gets up, slipping and sliding and keeling over. She reaches out to the roaring traffic and howls. Eventually, exhausted, defeated, she curls up into a foetal position and sleeps, clutching her handbag and shoes.

Up and at it: the coat is off, the black-and-white checked suit underneath (the pattern cleverly mirroring the wire wall; the suit another symbol of oppression) means business. The shoes are off, and are used to hammer the wire fence, then dug in, lodged into the wire, used as anchors to lever her up into an odd, distorted aerial dance. The colours are now a psychedelic kaleidoscope, indigos and greens and oranges, constantly evolving and changing, stripes, checks, a matrix of lines intersecting.

The electronic noise abates; now it’s beating drums, a jazzy, African edge to the soundscape. A shift in energy. No longer seeing herself as trapped victim, marooned in this abandoned space, the woman has accepted her fate and taken charge of it. She has wrapped a scarf around her head, re-arranged her dreadlocks, stripped down to a black bodysuit, limbs bare. She manoeuvres herself around a big red circular moon projected onto the wire wall, surveying her queendom, looking out at us, fearlessly…

And it is indeed a fearless performance we witness. Dancer/ choreographer Mele Brookes (founder member of the three-woman multidisciplinary collective V/DA) takes no prisoners in her breathtaking interpretation of the metamorphosis from victim to ruler of their own land, as experienced by the architect marooned on a traffic island in JG Ballard’s 1974 novel, Concrete Island. This is not a ‘version of’ it is an ‘inspired by’ – it is by no means a literal interpretation, and knowledge of the book is unnecessary for an appreciation of the show, which stands alone as a brilliant metaphor for isolation and exclusion from mainstream society, and for the taking back of control for the excluded one.

In Void, Ballard’s white, male, middle-aged, successful architect Maitland is replaced by black, female, young, aspiring architect Angela (not that she is ever named in the piece, just in the programme notes). The piece retains Ballard’s original central themes (outsider status, being marooned, fighting to be seen by the world whizzing by, coming to terms with ‘otherness’), layering them with ideas drawn from Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s The Undercurrents, a study of ‘fugitivity and blackness’.

The result is a an intense, Artaudian theatre of the senses, that reaches out through the bombardment of eye-boggling images and bone-juddering sounds to our intellect and imagination. Would Ballard approve? I like to think he would, very much indeed.

 Void is presented by V/DA and MHz in association with Feral, and is part of the Made in Scotland programme at Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2018.

The North Pole. 4am. A van is travelling across the tundra. We see this enacted in an exquisite sequence of object manipulation. A human body forms the snowy landscape and the little van pops up on the undersole of a foot and travels along the body. Tiny lights and miniature houses complete the scene.

Switch. The point of view is now close-up on the occupants of the van, three reporters. The van is a 2-D door held up as the three bounce along. One is smoking a cigarette out of the window of the van, the window going up and down. It is touches like these that really make the performance – excellent, finely detailed physical theatre work from the three co-creators, Julie Tenret, Sicaire Durieux, and Sandrine Heyraud.

Switch. They’re now out of the van, on the tundra. (They’ve moved in front of the puppetry table, in very close proximity to the audience.) A TV crew, we presume from the cameras and boom mics being wildly swung around and repositioned. They are clambering over each other, sitting on each other’s shoulders as the ice makes menacing cracking noises…

Switch. Point of view is now what the camera sees… relayed onscreen in one of the cleverest integrations of live and screen work I’ve seen for a while.

Switch: The camera is nestled beneath the paws of an enormous polar bear. Cue a very beautiful puppetry section, the three performers now manipulators, and proving that they are equally skilled in this department. And then – it ends.

Boom – 30 minutes of gorgeous physical and visual theatre, then gone. There’s something of a delight in short-form shows for Ed Fringe audiences – allowing people to pack in even more in a day. And it’s good, as an audience member, to leave feeling you want more. In a way it works narratively –  think of it as a short story, perhaps. But I leave feeling unsatisfied with the brevity of the piece – this offset a little by the company’s announcement at the end that they are working on extending the piece. Well thank goodness for that!

I do want to see what the company make of the challenge to create a full-length show, and hope that the work does eventually come back to the UK in its finished form. In the meantime – bravo! Quality physical and visual performance, and practically word-free, delivering narrative through image and physical action.

It is a delight to see such skilled puppetry, object manipulation, and comic physical performance wrapped up tightly into such a neat bundle. Backup is a sweet little tidbit that whets our appetite for more.