‘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

Catch em if you can!

All the way from Quebec – although in this case, Quebec City rather than Montreal – come Flip Fabrique, with a feel-good street-wise circus show that gets down with the kids. There’s a bunch of friends reunited,  there’s beat-boxing, there’s trampolining, there’s big red bouncy balls, there’s chalking on walls., there’s camping chairs, and there’s ‘dancing slug’ sleeping bags – an ingenious take on what someone (somewhere away from this cheery teenager-y world) might describe as whole-body-mask performance. 

Most of the show is upbeat – I Like to Move It, Move It – with plenty of zippy juggling and hooping (I’m reminded of Circus Oz quite often in the frenetic cheeriness of the whole thing). There’s a fantastic diabolo act – one of the best I’ve seen – in the form of a kind of diabolo duel. But there are some moments of calm, including a stunning straps act to Cinematic Orchestra’s melancholic To Build a Home. There is also a very lovely clowning-morphs-into hand-to-hand scene that is funny and tender all at once. The trampoline-and-wall bounce-off finale is stunning. I start off a little resistant to the show’s vibe, but they win me over with their brilliant technique and charming stage characters.

The team of six – five men and a single jaunty female (Jade Dussault) who flies like an angel in the acro scenes, and is a great hula hooper – all have prestigious pedigrees, having between them chalked up work with all the Quebecois big names: Cirque du Soleil, Les Sept Doigts, and Cirque Eloize. Under the direction of founder-member Bruno Gagnon, the team have come together because they genuinely are a group of friends who wanted to be reunited. Hence the show. Here are a bunch of young adults who want to resurrect the art of play – to retain and celebrate all they loved best as children.

This is circus with a young heart. It’s clear that they are here to have fun, and the fun is infectious. You can’t help but love them.

Four chairs, four performers – two male, two female. A rope, a tying-up game – which turns into a powerful corde lisse routine by Lauren Hurley (who was first seen seen and admired by Total Theatre in previous show What Will Have Been).

The frenetic soundtrack breaks into a cheesy Cha Cha and all four throw and catch and swing and tumble, this leading to a painfully beautiful trapeze act to a spooky version of the Sonny & Cher hit Bang Bang – as always with Circa shows, musical choices are spot-on – that uses air and ground inventively. Later, a great straps act to the Nouvelle Vague cover of The Killing Time (good to see a woman using this equipment, which is often seen as the territory for the beefiest of the male acrobats); a breathtaking hand-balancing sequence by one of the men, again really using the floor as well as the air; and a solo trapeze act by the other man, which very cleverly integrates Makaton (or similar) signing into the routine. If there were programme notes I could name the other three performers for you, but sadly not! It goes without saying, but will be said anyway, that all of the four are equally magnificent in their skills.

But what I enjoy most in this show is the complicity and playfulness between the performers. The acrobatic sequences that break up the specialty acts are no mere fillers – they are truly lovely ensemble pieces in which the four flirt and tease and tumble like puppies, capturing all the joys and pleasures of love and friendship without a word being spoken. As always with Circa, gender stereotypes are challenged, and the women are often bases, particularly Hurley, and the men often perform tenderly together. The facial expressions, and little glances and nudges between the four members of the team, are gorgeous – I love them all!

I will confess to some confusion about this show. I thought at first that it was a slightly rejigged version of Close Up (which played the Edinburgh Fringe in 2015, and featured a mix of live and screen action), but no – Closer is a new show, although retaining a few scenes from the now-aborted Close Up. The two scenes I remember from last year – which have now been remodelled and fit better into the dramaturgy of this show – are both involving the chairs. These chairs have become the silent stars of Closer…

One of the retained scenes is an audience participation number, in which eight chairs are lined up and the four performers each go out into the audience to find a partner to place in a chair and waltz around and with. It could be a cringy moment, but they pull it off.

They have also kept the breathtaking chair-and-human-body tower scene, which is now the finale. A suitably jaw-dropping ending to what is a lovely, lyrical and highly entertaining circus show. At the more mainstream end of the Circa spectrum – but that’s OK, there’s room for it all!

Ada and Ava are twin sisters. We first meet them in their home as elderly ladies, taking tea as the clock tick-tocks. But are they both really here? Where does one self end and another begin? It transpires that Ava is dead and Ada is holding tight to her memory. The mourning is a painful affair, and we sit sadly with Ada and watch the kettle boil.

It is a dark and stormy night, and as the lightning strikes and the thunder crashes, Ada (and we with her) are thrown into a world of dreams, memories and fantasies. Or are they? Perhaps Ada really does head off down the hill on her bicycle (the tandem now sadly no longer needed) to go to the carnival fairground and get herself locked overnight in the Mirror Maze…

Back we swirl in time to see Ada and Ava as little girls on a seaside trip, dipping their toes in the waves. Then, we are propelled back to Ada as an old lady – but now the twin sister she is sharing her life with has a skeleton’s hands and feet, and a skull head that needs a wig to hide the bony truth. In this new scary version of her familiar world, toothbrushes and hairbrushes have a life of their own, and no matter how hard Ada tries to persuade her sister to return to the grave, she’s having none of it.

We experience all of this fantastical, supernatural wonderment through a plethora of live and mediated imagery. Two actor-puppeteers (Lizi Breit and  Julia VanArsdale Miller) play Ada and Ava live in front of a screen, their shadow images projected (with no digital manipulation, so reversed out) on an even larger screen above and in front of them. But that is only part of the story…

Ada/Ava, created by Manual Cinema from Chicago, is a magnificent artistic and technical achievement, in which gorgeously crafted shadow puppetry (using handmade black-block silhouette figures); live-actor mask and shadow theatre; cinematic techniques making use of vintage projectors, two large screens, OHPs and live-feed cameras; and live music combine.

Everything we see and hear in this completely word-free show is made, here and now, in front of our astonished eyes. For UK audiences, the points of reference might be some sort of amalgam of the work of Paper Cinema and 1927. Coloured acetates in a beautiful palette of charcoal greys, faded indigos, Indian yellows, and Northern Lights greens form the backdrops, onto which the gorgeously crafted silhouettes of skylines, or trees, or kitchen hobs, are placed. Ada and Ava, appearing either as the shadows of the actors or as tiny little shadow-puppet figures, depending on the scene, move within this cleverly created background scene. We see the ‘making of’ as well as witnessing the final result simultaneously. de.natashaescort.com The two actor-puppeteers (who move back and forth from performing in front of the back-lit rear screen to the OHP light-boxes, never resting) are joined by a further three puppeteers/visual artists on stage. They are augmented by three musicians (cello/electric piano, guitar, clarinet/vocals, plus live Foley sound effects) give us  a couple of beautiful jazz tunes (All of Me, and the Duke Ellington classic Solitude) as well as providing all of the rest of the soundscape.

A breathtakingly beautiful and clever show that explores the fear of the shadow of death with gentle humour. There is so much to see on stage and screen and in between – I could easily watch it again and again.