A drag king punk gig about architecture and idealism? Bring it on! Cuncrete sees Rachael Clerke assume the identity of Archie ‘I invented the Barbican’ Tactful, architect, who becomes the vessel for her exploration of the domination of our built environment by Great White Males. She is aided and abetted by a posse of performance artists turned punk rockers – Eleanor Fogg aka johnsmith the banker on guitar; Anna Smith as Little Keith the landlord on drums; and Josephine Joy as Johnny Jove on bass. Johnsmith is his usual elegant and restrained self, even when Archie tries to embroil him in the classic singer-and-lead-guitarist rock-out. Little Keith is a cartoon drummer – bashing the crash cymbal constantly, and breaking out into ludicrous piss-take drum solos. Johnny Jove is a bit of a Steve Jones – a cheeky chappie with an eye on the ladies.

None of them have ever been in a band before, and the sound is often reminiscent of the stage-2 tower block punk of Sham 69 or Eater. Names that’ll mean almost nothing to anyone under 50. Anyway, they sound the way people always imagine punk to be, fast and thrashy for the most part, and cheerfully chaotic – here’s three chords, form a band and all that. Brash, ballsy, macho. Occasionally, with their bass-led songs, they sound less like the boy thrashers and a bit more like one of the trailblazing female punk bands – Slits, Raincoats, Kleenex. That I like.

So the music and the punk-pop personae are there to serve a rant about the modern city. Its phallic towers, its brutalist estates, its overpriced housing… The lyrics are cut-ups of texts filched from a wide ranch of sources, from JG Ballard’s dystopian novel about city living, High Rise, to the writings of the Brutalism Appreciation Society. Grayson Perry, Hugh Hefner and George Bernard Shaw are also cited, apparently. At one point, the dulcet tones of Margaret Thatcher – one of her bone-chilling speeches on home ownership – ring out in the tawdry room. Archie opens his arms and welcomes her in.

Rachael Clerke has stated her intention to create work that is funny and political  at the same time – which this is. I enjoy Archie’s words and the delivery of the text – crisp and clever satire, a damning indictment of our contemporary attitudes towards architecting our environment and providing enough homes for people to live in. I love a lot of the stage setting and the design: the beginning where the band’s lead singer bursts through a paper screen is fabulous; Archie’s costume in general, and ludicrous ‘wings’ in particular, fantastic; the dragging onstage of a concrete-mixer is a wonderfully surreal moment.

By creating a band that is a fictional construct, Rachael Clerke and the Great White Males are following in the footsteps of a succession of art-school bands and art projects using music as a medium, Throbbing Gristle started as a pretend band created by COUM Transmissions for the opening of their Prostitution exhibition; David Devant and His Spirit Wife first saw light of day as an MA degree show for the Narrative and Sequential Art course at University of Brighton. Die Rotten Punke are Australians playing a fictional German punk band, parodying the rock and roll lifestyle. These three very different forerunners all share aspects of their content and form with this project.

It’s a highly enjoyable experience although I feel that I want more – I want them to really be the drag king punk band they want to be – to hone the musical parody into something a little cleverer than jokey pseudo drum solos. In the way that the text is somehow both Archie, and Rachael’s parody of Archie, in one body – the thing itself and the commentary on the thing – the music could also function in this way. It could be a damn good girl punk band whilst parodying the bad boy punk bands. Sometimes it is close to being that, but it could go further.

But the foundations are strong…  Cuncrete is a great (art) concept, executed with panache. Open the champagne, someone!

The space is so inviting! A large Spiegeltent, with a bed on a platform in the middle of the circular space, a kind of giant lampshade above it. Soft night-time lighting, in gentle blues and ambers. All around the edges of the floor space, little beds and cushions. Behind them, rows of chairs covered with fluffy rugs. I feel like bagging one of the wee beds, but magnanimously give that over to two small girls, and take one of the fluffy chairs instead.

Bedtime Stories is, as far as I know, Upswing’s first children’s show (although previous work by the company, such as the delightful reimagining of Red Shoes, has often been family-friendly) – and what a pleasure it is to see a company with such sound circus / physical performance skills taking on the creation of a show for very young human beings.

Visually, it is a delight. The ‘paper lampshade’ cube is used as a four-sided screen for video and animation, which includes a very lovely cut-out shadow theatre story (of The Princess and the Nightingale). The interaction between the live performer playing the little girl on the bed and the animations is delightful. The physical work in the show is excellent – a mix of aerial silks, acrobatics, tumbling, and exuberant whizzing around on wheelie chairs. I love the way the white silks over the bed look like bedsheets, climbed up in an escape from the bed (and thus bedtime) that is both physical and metaphorical.

There is a strong narrative – seemingly simple, the story of a little girl who won’t settle down to sleep, preferring instead to romp with her imaginary friend, a boy called Three. It is made more complex by the back-story of her mother’s immensely busy life and thus stress around the bedtime story reading – the ‘mummy needs you to go to sleep’ syndrome that all parents in the audience will recognise with a sigh. Which brings us to a small problem in that show is pitched at very young children (age 2+ says the publicity!), but the narrative floats a little between age groups, and the mother’s scenes in particular are far more suitable for older children and adults. I feel it would be a stronger show if it rooted itself more firmly in one camp or the other with its storytelling. Who is the show really for? If the aim is to make a show for very young children, then the narrative needs editing back, and the show running time cut back by at least 15 minutes. If the company feel that this is the story they want to tell, then up the age guide to 6+.

Although embodied in the physical action and visual imagery, the narrative does rely quite strongly on spoken text, which is very hard to hear (at least on the occasion that I saw it, early in the run at Edinburgh’s Circus Hub). This problem may well be solved by using mics, at least for this particular venue. It is a perennial problem for circus-theatre, as few performers are equally skilled in circus skills and voicework. The male performer fares better than the two women performers in projecting his voice out to an audience in the round in a large space with a lot of background noise from both inside and outside the tent, which would be a challenge for any actor – but all three could do with more development in this area of their work.

Despite these reservations, I really enjoyed the show – it has a lovely visual aesthetic; exuberant performances from a personable, engaging and talented trio of circus artists; and it is tackling a dilemma for parents and children – the issue of so-called ‘quality time’, and the child and parent’s attitude to bedtime and separate needs – that is something worth reflecting on and discussing within a theatrical context.

The company has taken the time to create a loving and caring environment for young audiences, and recognise (as have pioneers like Theatre-Rites) that even the youngest amongst us deserve to be given performance work of quality.

What’s she gonna look like with a chimney on her… If you wanna be my lover… Stop right now, thank you very much… It’s not unusual to be loved by anyone… Hey, the Macarena!

What’s your feel-good throwback song? The song that reminds you of the good times? Write it on a piece of paper, make the best paper plane you can, and throw it onto the stage…

And their off! Dancing and tumbling and talking straight out to the audience, Silver Lining take no prisoners in an energetic and exuberant start to their show Throwback. Within five minutes of arriving on stage, bouncing round like a litter over-excited puppies, they have us eating out of their hands. And that’s it for the next hour. I’ve seen a lot of shows where those on stage show us what it’s like to be at the best party of your life – in this one, we feel part of the party from the word go. And they do the fabulous Patrick Swayze lift from Dirty Dancing – on top of a three-person tower! – in the opening sing-along sequence of the show, so even if I hadn’t been completely sold from the start, they’d have had my undying love from that moment on.

Using a format that, in the interest of fairness it needs to be said owes a little something to both Traces by Quebec’s Les 7 Doigts, and UK circus hit Pirates of the Carabina, Throwback is a kind of confessional coming-of-age circus show that intersperses skill-based acts with the sharing of little vignettes of autobiographical material – stories, songs, and more. But actually, do I care if I’ve seen something similar(ish) in format before? Not at all. This troupe of six super-talented young performers (graduates of the National Centre for Circus Arts, aka Circus Space, and nurtured by London’s premier circus venue, Jacksons Lane) make it all their own.

Skills-wise, we have a boy on the trapeze, who I think might be called Tom, who starts his solo slot off very nicely with a neck-hang, eliciting gasps from the girls in the row in front of me. Tom is a sweet soul who seems to have an obsession with horses. In a line-up yes-no game they play out twice in the show, Tom tells us he had a Pony in my Pocket and wanted to be a horse when he grew up. The line-up game is used to tell us what age everyone is (22! 24!), whether they prefer tea or coffee, whether they are single or not, whether they prefer cats or dogs. An Irish girl with an auburn pony-tail and a lovely smile sings the song Smile acapella, a favourite in her family of singing sisters, before going into a very nicely executed hand-balancing act. An energetic break-dancing boy who might be called LJ channels the spirit of Michael Jackson and does a good strong straps act to Come Together. Sam is the dark and moody-looking one who tells a heartbreaking story of his mother getting in to debt to buy her children a piano, who then gets cheers from both the ladies and the gentlemen of the audience when he takes his shirt off for his elegant hand-balancing act. The girl from Berlin in the red dress has tales to tell of her love of traditional German tunes. She is also a great foot juggler, using not only the traditional rola-bola, but an assortment of colourful umbrellas. Number six is the Scottish guy (cue cheers from the audience), a beefy base in an AC/DC T-shirt who confesses to a broken heart brought about by his own infidelity. His frustration gets played out in a Chinese Pole act in which the pole seems to bear the brunt of his frustration.

Inbetween and around the solo acts are lovely little moments of ensemble work. Tom’s trapeze act ends with him sliding down from the trapeze over a human slide. He also gets a moment that needs to be mentioned where he plays air guitar on a hoop…

 Throwback is a show full of upbeat energy, humour and a sound body of circus skills. They may be young, but they have already learnt how to use what they are good at in the service of the show, rather than just performing tricks for the sake of showing off the skill. Great team work, lovely stage presence, plenty of humour, a whole swathe of cute and clever pop culture references.

I had The Time of my Life, thank you very much.

‘Good evening this is your captain speaking. Get ready for a crash landing. We’re going down’. 

 Perhaps Hope is a circus show with a difference: a dark and moody circus-theatre exploration of a dystopian future. Or perhaps it’s the present. Two people – a kind of end-of-civilisation Adam and Eve – are marooned somewhere, who knows where, or when. We presume that there has been some sort of disaster – probably an ecological meltdown. ‘There must be someone to blame’ says the recorded voiceover at one point: ‘No birds, no bees, no HIV. No Lions. No tigers. No vegetarians. No lesbians. No smuggling. no recycling. No immigration.’ The point being, all the pros and cons of human life, all the opinions and personal identity issues that currently engage and concern us, will have become nothing, meaningless.

To the sound of a slightly remixed and distorted version of Laurie Anderson’s O Superman, they stand staring out at us, leaning into each other; one tall, one short, their shadows cast large behind them onto the wall. It’s an image that’s repeated, with slight variations, throughout the show – one of many sound and movement motifs returned to again and again, rituals or obsessive-compulsive tics.

Onstage with them is a lovely carved-wood boat cum see saw; and behind that a metal sculpture reminiscent of a ship’s mast or a radio antenna that is animated and played at regular intervals. There is also a stack of bottles and wooden tabletops/trays, that are formed into an ever-higher tower which is eventually stood on, the woman at the top staring out defiantly. Or perhaps hopefully. The bottles are also placed along the ‘boat’ and walked over: the circus skills employed throughout are predominantly balancing of one sort or another – acrobalance duets, solo hand-balancing, and walking or standing on or manipulating the see-saw boat.

The two performers (both Australian, with a performance CV that includes work with both Circa and Casus) are, inevitably with that track record, highly skilled. The acrobalance work together is beautifully controlled – and they are clever enough to play the ‘try, fail, and try again’ trick perfectly, for example as she teeters along on the bottles, reaching out to him for help.

Their characters, or onstage performance personae, work well together. There are some very lovely scenes. I love her crazy silent disco dancing whilst he stays straight and still, upside down in a perfect handstand on the balance sticks. They are not afraid to do nothing, often returning to points of stillness before the next bout of activity.

It is so great to see circus employed to say something about the world; and to see a show in which the various components – acrobatic and balancing skills, recorded spoken text montage, an elegant sound design, sparse but beautifully crafted set, and great lighting design – all merge so beautifully and harmoniously together, put to work in the telling of the tale.

And despite the shadowy gloom (literal and metaphorical) throughout, there are moments of humour – and the show ends on an optimistic note: it’s a new world, it’s a new dawn, it’s a new day… there is, perhaps, hope.

It Folds is a harrowing, heartbreaking and sometimes darkly humorous investigation of death and grief. It is mostly the story of lost children. Children abused or abducted or run over or gone missing, permanently. It is a story told by a (holy) ghost in a sheet with holes for the eyes, and trainers; a dishevelled, twitching angel; a pantomime horse with a rebellious rear end; and a banjo-playing, grieving mother.

The onstage world presents us with a series of disturbing dream images, conjuring up a bardo of becoming beyond death for those who have departed, and the confused and frightened imaginings and memories and rituals of those who are left behind.

Objects – real or imagined – play an important part. There are at least two pairs of broken spectacles spoken of – a blue plastic pair found somewhere near where a dead boy might be buried, and a distraught father’s specs with a broken lens that he dons to read an eulogy to his son at the funeral (much to the embarrassment of the boy’s friends). As for real onstage objects: we have a toy horse pinata dangling from the ceiling and an ornate padded chair. That’s our lot. Everything else is in or on the bodies of the performers. A tatty horse costume, a gold cardboard party hat, a blindfold, a stick…

It Folds is a collaboration between Total Theatre Award winning theatre company Brokentalkers, and dance-theatre company Junk Ensemble. Both companies are based at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin. The piece is a perfect mesh of the two company’s styles and mores. Brokentalkers’ talent with earthy, deconstructed, poetic text; an interesting and surreal exploration of physical object and costume; and ritualised action is very present. See, for example scenes that give us an older woman talking to an empty suit sat in a chair;  re-enactments of a visit to seek the advice of a spirit guide; or the repeated motif of the happy birthday song that recurs throughout the show. The beautifully real and edgy choreography from Junk Ensemble includes a wonderful duet between two men – an older, sturdier man moving and manipulating and imposing upon a boyish and slim figure who stiffly leans and falls whilst being hugged and pulled about, then is dragged across the floor whilst straight as a plank. It makes for an extraordinary and disturbing picture of abuse.

There is a large cast, the professional actors/dancers joined by a community choir who play a host of ghosts singing angelically. But often the stage is occupied by just two or three performers at a time. There is space to breathe – visual images, exchanges of words, or choreographic sections are allowed to play out; to have the time and space to work their way into our imaginations.

Disturbing, but not distressing – a surreal exploration of the elephant (or stuffed horse) in all of our rooms, death. We are the dead.