In which an architect and a photographer compose an audovisual story live on stage. It’s all very simple – well, deceptively simple. It’s actually all very cleverly thought out and constructed.

At first, you notice – or at least, I noticed – two main focal points on the stage. Architectural models of buildings, one a modernist box, the other more of a ‘doll’s house’ house. There are two performers – or animators of the space is perhaps a better term. One, Steve Salember, fiddles with the models, adds and subtracts, rearranges. The other, Charlotte Bouckaert, places herself as the viewer, and, camera in hand, takes images which are then projected in enormous scale on the back wall. But she isn’t merely the viewer, the witness. She becomes the architect of the new onscreen space. The very act of taking the pictures of the space changes the space; changes our relationship to what we are seeing.

What are we seeing? We see what seems to be a deserted warehouse or aircraft hangar. We see a disrupted dinner party. So many of these images are about absence; the show becomes a photo album of absence. Where are all the people in these monochrome worlds?

The other crucial element is that of sound. This short work – just 35 minutes – relies on the soundscape (a mix of live and pre-recorded) to help create the dramaturgy of the piece. Example: we hear the sound of a ping-pong ball bouncing off of a table. Then lots of ping pong balls. The sound grows and resonates until it become a cacophony. On screen we see one ping pong ball bouncing. Then we see a roomful, appearing to cascade down onto a table. At the end of the show, when I look at the models on the way out, I see one ping-pong ball in a box, and I see that in the room with the tiny doll-size table a chairs, a cluster of tiny polystyrene beads portraying the table-tennis balls. ah yes, of course.  There are also moments when Steve Salember goes and sits and plays guitar. A nice addition, although I’m not sure what it adds to the dramaturgy of the piece. Perhaps it is because it is another parallel way that he can craft the space; the aural landscape?

The stories are created by the performers in the space; and they are created by us, in our heads. We see what the architect has designed, and/or we see what the photographer is focusing on and is framing, and/or we see what we want to see. As the piece progresses, the focus shifts to other little models or boxes in the room, each lit in turn – five or 6 in total – and then on the floor itself. But the mediated image, the screen, is all dominant, it is hard to pull your eyes away from it – and I think that is the point.

I love the fact that we see the stories unfold in still images, rather than moving image. I love the quiet presence on the performer/animators, gentle giants in their domain, benign gods. I love the stories that unfold, and seem to ultimately take us away from a man-built world and into a more primal world of waves and duststorms and sticks drawing in the sand.

A quietly beautiful and meditative show, a world away from the razz-a-ma-tazz of much of the rest of the Fringe.

 Bildraum won a Total Theatre Award 2016 in the  Physical/Visual Performance category. It is presented at Summerhall as part of the Big in Belgium programme of work. 

Make some noise, the hot brown honeys are here! Five feisty Australasian women of colour who are NOT going to be quiet, but instead are going to take some space for themselves; are going to show us who they are. We’re not witches, they say, but something wicked this way comes…

So stand up and, yeah, make some noise for: Ofa Fotu, ­Matehaere Hope ‘Hope One’ Haami, Juanita ­Duncan, Crystal Stacey, and your host/DJ Busty Beatz.

They do their stuff above, in front of, and around a hive – a great, flashing, brightly-lit honeycomb structure with luscious gold and brown cells. And what stuff do they do? Oh my! Busty Beatz is Queen Bee, running the show from on high. She raps, she proclaims, she says ‘fighting the power never tasted so sweet’, she warns ‘DON”T TOUCH MY HAIR’ – cue a sung celebration of the ‘afro’ with a rousing chorus that gets the whole of the audience on to their feet cheering and singing along. There’s soulful singing from Ofa Fotu and beatboxing from Hope One.

There’s a lot of dance – cabaret and burlesque routines that simultaneously exploit and undermine cultural stereotypes. For ‘a stereotype isn’t untrue, it’s just one part of the picture’ says Busty. A fabulous Polynesian / South Pacific parody. A coconuts and grass skirts dance. A wicked illusionist reverse striptease. A rocking romp in black-and-white maids’ outfits – hellzapopin’! And there are Busty’s great big boobies to suffocate you with, as she runs amok in the audience picking her victims with glee (two bald men – one bemused, one gagging for it – and one woman on the night I’m in).

There’s circus too: a pretty good hula hooping number, and Crystal Stacey does one of the best straps routines in this year’s Fringe – a harrowing visual portrayal of domestic abuse.

What it all proves, if you didn’t already know it, is that circus, cabaret and burlesque can be used to create subversive political performance.

The work sits within a framework of contemporary artists across the world who have eschewed the ‘regular’ theatre in favour of occupying other spaces, using popular forms to communicate a challenge to racism, sexism and colonialism. I would place in this frame the work of La Pocha Nostra / Guillermo Gomez Pena (Mexico/USA); Zecora Ura / Jade Persis Maravala (Brazil/UK); Jonathan Grieve and Nwando Ebizie aka Lady Vendredi(UK/Nigeria) amongst others. It’s a world-wide phenomenon, my friends. We’re all Singin and Swingin and Gettin Merry like Christmas…

It is, most definitely, not the time to sit down quietly in the corner and hope everything will improve. Now’s the moment to stand up and show your true colours, to Rock the Boat, Baby – and these five feisty women of colour from the Southern Hemisphere are here to help. All power to them!

A Honeydripper delight of a show, totally Fringe, and totally total theatre to boot! I’m still buzzing…

Hot Brown Honey won the Total Theatre Award 2016 for Innovation, Experimentation and Playing with Form. 

A body, carrying weight. The weight of frocks and feathers and furbelows. Centuries of feminine adornment.  Cue megaphone: This is Julia. This is her body. It’s a good body, a valuable body. A very rare diamond.

Onscreen, shots of a phone screen, texting/sexting. Or something. Close-up shots of her eye, her tongue, her foot, some other bits of flesh.

Cue: a play. Or maybe its a film script. There seem to be two characters in the scene, Rose (an artist’s muse) and Jack (an artist). Oh hang on, I’ve got it – Titanic!  ‘I want you to draw me like one of your French girls… wearing this… wearing only this.’ Close-up on Rose’s face. Dissolve.

Cue song ‘Je ne veux pas travailler’. Cue pink satin kimono, cue green mini dress (plus champagne and willing audience member), cue 80s leggings and a slash of red lipstick that turns into clown make-up, cue the ubiquitous, the inevitable red dress, and a chalk body outline drawn on the floor. A tutu. Swan Lake. More films. More film scripts.

On screen, a recipe for a cocktail: The Leg Spreader. On stage, the noisiest hostess trolley in the world rattles through. There’s more. Twerking in a black catsuit. A sweet pink dress, and ‘I’m just a girl standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her…’ Oh shit, what’s that one? I know it, of course I do. Fail. I have to look it up afterwards. Notting Hill – of course.

I could go on, you get the gist. It’s a game. A spot-the-pop-culture-reference game. It’s a spectacle about the casting of the female body as spectacle in contemporary culture. It is the critique of the thing and the thing itself.  It’s of course about the male gaze and the female response to the gaze and the objectifying and politicising of the female body and… and I haven’t even mentioned the pom-poms or the purple tights, or the pop music. Pretty Woman. Blue Velvet. And something modern, with very rude lyrics. I couldn’t possibly repeat them here.

And it is all Julia Croft! The creating, the performing. The performing! She has us in the palm of her hand for the hour. It’s like a marathon, a triathlon of costume changing and lip synching and exuberant dancing. Because, remember, If There’s Not Dancing at the Revolution, I’m not Coming.

Postmodern performance art meets power pop politics – powerfully delivered. I loved it with a vengeance. I want to join her revolution.

‘OK my darling, up you pop… down you pop… just pop your arms up and I’ll pop this nightie off… A cup of tea? A biscuit? A bourbon, a custard cream, a digestive? OK, botty on potty… Oh, careful my darling, you don’t want to fall down again like Humpty Dumpty, do you?’

Guilia Innocenti is the care-home assistant, catching the cadences and cheerful bullying so prevalent of the profession with humorous precision. Lucinka Eisler is her patient (Marsha Hewitt) who on the surface patiently succumbs to the regimes of dressing and eating and TV watching, but who inwardly seeths with a sharp-witted anger and resentment, committing minor acts of silent rebellion which mostly involve her handbag (a repository for the TV remote control, and her unwanted dinner: peas, mash, and a slab of mystery meat). The final point of a triangle of thousands of years of human evolution, here she stands. Or sits, here she sits. And sits. In the lounge. Lucinka Eisler’s stiff, straight-backed, angular posture and blank face is perfect. She gazes out at us. We gaze back.

‘Woman, age 97, pale skin, blue eyes, broken hip, closes eyes, dies… ‘ says the voiceover. But not yet, there is still some living to do, here in The Lounge. The third person onstage is Ben Lewis: male nurse with an Eastern European accent, elderly gentleman resident with a penchant for escaping to the local petrol station to buy a can of Pepsi and a packet of crisps, visiting grandson arriving with belated birthday present. Guilia Innocenti also switches roles, sometimes taking up the third armchair to become Marsha’s nemesis, a biscuit-eating slouch who wants Jeremy Kyle on at maximum volume. She makes her transformations in and out of the armchair, from carer to cared-for, with the kind of totally believable in-the-moment transformation of the body and face that comes only with a sound training in physical theatre skills (in the case of Inspector Sands, the Lecoq in Paris, where all three trained).

The play starts as clownish heightened reality, a farce, which is all excellently done and highly entertaining, but this being Inspector Sands, it evolves into something far more radical and surreal. Reality and fantasy, memory and imagination, blur and blend as Marsha tries to bribe the grandson into helping her escape, to return to her home to thwart and haunt the house’s new owners. (Her garden with the three birdfeeders! Her carriage clock that she never winds because it has an annoying tick!) She got moved into the home because she fell over, and lay there alone for 12 hours. ‘But I lived!’ her inner voice cries out. And what’s the point of living if all you’re living for is the fight for the control of the TV remote.

Hilariously funny, beautifully written and designed, elegantly performed, but more – the show hits home with a sledgehammer the point that we need to find a way to care for the elders of our society that is a darn sight more loving and respectful than the current options.

The Lounge is an important piece of work. It’s our future we’re looking at here – ageing and death is, after all, something that’s not going to go away. There’s no way out for any of us here…

The Lounge has been made with support from the Welcome Trust, in collaboration with biomedical experts on ageing, and with the Mass Observation movement, which documents the minutae of everyday life in the service of portraying larger socio-political realities. Presented at Summerhall by Inspector Sands and China Plate.

No, not that Windsor House. This one is on an estate in the not-so-Green Lanes area of North London – fag end of Finsbury Park to you and me, guv. And here we are! On-screen, we see the glorious exterior of the block of council flats, and the wasteland around it, with an estate agent sales-pitch voiceover.

Yep, the Sh!t girls, Louise Mothersole and Becca Biscuit (a punk dole name, if ever I heard one), live here. Yep, they live and work together, with all the strains and stresses that this entails. And yep, in a council flat, although they are private tenants –another problem brewing, as once they’ve worked out that their landlord is illegally sub-letting his council gaff, what to do? Do they shop him to the authorities, which might mean losing their home as they are illegals, or do they keep schtum? The third strand of the show – the one around which all else circles – are all the unopened letters  piling up, addressed to people who’ve lived there in Windsor House, and have moved on without bothering to get their mail forwarded. Another ethical dilemma: is it OK to open other people’s post, if it has sat around unclaimed for months by people long moved on? Yes, they decide. They change the names slightly in the telling, but have no qualms about exposing the remains after the departures: Daisy Murray, subscription to National Geographic; Saad Madras, letters from loan companies and the Grosvenor Casino; Rob Jecock, baby catalogues and breast cancer awareness information.

So these three things – the agony and ecstasy of living with someone you love dearly and work with; the appalling housing situation for Londoners, specifically young people on lower incomes who have not a hope in hell of finding somewhere decent to rent at a fair price; and the romance of the lives of others, people you don’t know who have occupied the same space you are now in – are weaved very cleverly and beautifully together into a show that sees the former Total Theatre Award winners graduate from being ‘emerging artists’ into fully blossomed, confident and accomplished writers and performers.

All the usual Sh!t Theatre elements are here: extensive research into real life stories; cocky songs, played and sung with vim and vigour; a lo-tech set and lovingly handmade props (scuzzy sofa, cardboard boxes, whole-body post box costumes, oh yes!). There’s the documentary/mocumentary footage: the estate agent sell of an old mattress flung by a broken fence; the piles of letters on the chest-of-drawers in the hall; a video tour of the area, which includes a high street lined with Poundworlds, a pub called The Happy Man filled with unhappy men, and a fish and chip shop called #Hashtag Fish and Chips.  There’s also an element of Cockney Music Hall which is fabulous – pushed to almost-dodgy limits in its Oliver! piss-take of  landlord Fagin. Dickensian ain’t in it.

It’s all there, and it all mulches together beautifully. The show is gorgeously written – both in the sense of the spoken text, and the dramaturgy of the piece – and performed with total confidence and showbiz pizzazz.

It is witty and entertaining and political. It is also, in its telling of Louise and Becca’s personal story – told whilst dressed as post boxes, the Sh!ts reading letters to each other – poignant to the point of heartbreak.

Letters to Windsor is presented at Summerhall in association with Show and Tell