Yellow bird, oh so pretty, perches on a wooden bench, then clambers amongst the audience. She’s sweet and smiley, wearing a 1950s style cotton sundress with a pretty print of lemons and leaves. She clambers over the steeply tiered seats of Summerhall’s Demonstration Room, whispering in people’s ears. I have the best seat in the house. I know because a little bird told me. To get to my seat I had to scramble over a body slumped on the floor – another young woman, this one in a smart black skirt and jacket, wearing one patent leather high-heeled shoe. A pool of vomit is next to her mouth. Also in the space is a monitor playing a video; images of a woman with long platinum hair diving onto a sofa. There’s a fourth presence, a voice-over (also female): ‘I saw you in the supermarket choosing cheese..’ says the voice, then rather more surreally ‘I saw you eating digestives on the beach with Patsy Cline…’

Yellow bird girl, still smiling, clambers down onto the stage, and tries to perch somewhere there. She perches on stools, on the TV monitor, in mid-air, on the body prone on the floor. A swing! There’s a swing! She perches on that, swinging and smiling, a caged bird on a swing. The body on the floor splutters into life, gagging and spitting. She staggers up, moves around in a lop-sided jiggle, one shoe off and one shoe on. She moves into a rigorous gestural choreography, then into an intense duet of slaps and falls and catches with bird girl. And that’s just the start! The next hour is exhausting and exhaustive for both audience and performers. There’s no let up, and these young women have no fear. Far from shying away from danger, they confront it. Sexually provocative posture and posturing is played with, exploited, and undermined. Lying on their fronts, Lolita-like in novelty shades, licking a giant ice lolly, hair blown in the fake wind of a cheap electric fan, they bask in the glory of the gaze coming their way,  then return the gaze defiantly. Images of winsome women, wanton women, women losing it, women putting up with it through gritted teeth, women out of control, women abused and abusing – it’s all here, presented using a fabulous language of physical, visual and verbal absurdism. They laugh! They cry! They dance! Perhaps they’ll peck each other to death, who knows?

Hysterically funny in the darkest possible way. Nice and nasty. Visceral, juddering theatre. If you want a comfortable night out, this isn’t for you. If you want to be shaken and stirred, amused and disturbed in equal measures, go.

Project HaHa runs at Summerhall throughout August, everyday except Monday.

You know when you’re reading a story to a child and they say ‘again!’ and you have to go back and tell it again? That. Our storyteller is Seth Kriebel, but he isn’t sitting in a cosy armchair, and there is no fringed standard lamp by his side. He’s sat at a desk lit by Anglepoise lamps, speaking into a mic, a blue screen behind him. Or an orange screen. You choose. One is yes and one is no. One is left and one is right. one is up and one is down. Stay on the train? Get off the train? Open the suitcase? Leave the suitcase unopened? Life is full of choices, but unlike life, here we get a second chance. Back we go to start again, and again. Cast your vote – this is a democracy. Majority rule.

We This Way is a clever take on both traditional storytelling and contemporary interactive game-playing. The archetypal world of fairy tales is richly mined: there’s a hidden staircase down to an underground world and a line of discarded shoes (The Twelve Dancing Princesses come to mind). A staircase in a tower (Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin, Sleeping Beauty). We meet a Minotaur in reading glasses. We find a fairground, and enter a hall of mirrors.  Elsewhere, down other paths, there are lighthouses, boats and treasure hunts. Glass slippers. Ruby slippers. Red shoes. Winged sandals.

The stories wend and weave – sometimes linear, sometimes circular, often spiralling. It’s a complex piece to deliver, the performer at the mercy of the audience, who determine which paths to take. But we’re in safe hands – Seth Kriebel knows what he’s doing, and does it very well. We travel through a multiplicity of worlds without leaving our seats, enchanted – a simple but spellbinding piece of theatre.

 We This Way was commissioned by and developed at Battersea Arts Centre. At Summerhall every day except Tuesdays throughout August, 12.25

So here is Peaseblossom: cheeky, chirpy, distributing flowers amongst the audience with a wink and a smile. The purple one is very special, she confides to the young woman sitting next to me in the front row. Take it – but when I ask, you’ll give it back to me, won’t you? She’s coming! says Peaseblossom, and now Titania is in the room, wild, lyrical, flighty. She picks up a cello sat on a music stand which is decorated with – of course – fairy lights. Her voice soars and sighs, the cello bowed with fast, intense passion. And now here is Puck: laconic, jazzy, the embodiment of cool. Oberon is shrouded in smoke, a breathy growl.

All of these characters  are embodied in one person – the only person on stage – the highly talented Anna-Helen McLean, former principal performer with Poland’s Gardzienice Centre for Theatre Practices, and artistic associate of that other Grotowski-legacy Polish company, Song of the Goat. She brings to this one-woman tour-de-force her years of experience as a singer, composer and physical theatre performer; morphing with ease from one character to another in this highly entertaining piece inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Her relationship with the audience also reflects her experience as a performer, most notably in the scene in which Oberon drugs Titania, causing her to fall in love with the first creature she sees. Anna-Helena has us baa-ing and barking and howling at the moon like fools. She then comes amongst us, and pulls her chosen Bottom out of the audience, leading him to her bower, a whole team of fairy helpers enlisted to stroke his brow and scatter rose petals over him.

At other points, her cello is her lover. Sometimes she sits on the low stool and plays, often bringing multi-track looping of the instrument and of her voice into the mix. Extraordinary sounds come from her – something between beatboxing and scat singing. Often she stands, or squats, or crouches – still in perfect control of the cello. If she’s not looping her voice, she sings without a mic, hitting a wonderful range of notes. As she sings ‘mermaid on a dolphin’s back’ she hits the siren-high notes as she straddles the cello. As Oberon arrives to growl ‘ill met by moonlight’, she channels him with her back to us, her voice is as low as low could be.

There are things that could be improved. I’m not too keen on the stage design – the astroturf and silk flowers are a little kitsch, but not kitsch enough to be interesting. I’d also happily see the smoke machine out of the action – it feels like an unnecessary theatrical trimming. There are times when the piece becomes so much of a showcase for Anna-Helena’s talents that it loses a little bit of its soul.

But mostly it’s a truly accomplished and entertaining take on Shakespeare’s comedy; full of sparkle, magic and music.

Moon Fool Titania plays at Summerhall throughout August, every day except Mondays.

We are here trying to find a translation. Are you listening? Do you understand? How are you doing? Are you assimilating, processing, interpreting? Perhaps you’re looking, reading the body language of the two women sitting side-by-side, joined at the hip by the voluptuous folds of dresses that billow over their chairs and on to the floor. One is light skinned, one is dark skinned. One has short hair, one has long hair. Is this significant, important? What will this be about? What stories are they already telling, sitting there? There is a great concertina of cream-coloured pages arranged across their laps, moving along like an archaic ticker tape. Joined-up writing. Are you listening to the woman who is speaking, or watching the woman who is signing? Or both at once? Sometimes they don’t speak, don’t sign, just sit silent and upright, looking out at us, returning our gaze. If you don’t know what to say and when to say it, be quiet. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. That’s a quote from Wittgenstein, who features heavily here. I hope I’ve spelt his name right. Spelled.

Sue MacLaine’s Can I Start Again Please is a gorgeous piece of theatre, using a mesmerising mix of verbal, visual and physical languages to tell its story. It is performed by  Sue MacLaine and Nadia Nadarajah, with a beautiful design by Lucy Bradridge, and choreographer Jonathan Burrows as outside eye. What’s being investigated here is the power and failings of language – languages of all sorts – to tell truths that want to hide. In particular, a story of childhood sexual abuse. Words can hide as much as they reveal. Is it a rabbit or a duck? Is it a lamp or her dad, next to her in the bedroom? The harsh words burst out, subverting the calm tones of the storyteller. It is heartbreaking. This is the teddy bear in the wreckage.

Often, the two performers play out the duality of the neutral, factual retelling of horrors, and the inner turmoil these words provoke. Sue speaks slowly and carefully, articulates, pronounces, declaims. Nadia gesticulates wildly, shakes her head, flings her arms out in a mixture of anger and defence. In one particularly moving moment, deaf actor Nadia speaks, her articulation distorting the vile words voiced, these words repeated very quietly by Sue, who is now the one using British Sign Language as her voice. ‘You know you’re a little whore, don’t you?’ Sit quiet, don’t tell or you die, believes the child. He who is silent is assumed to consent, says the adult who has chosen to speak. Speak up. Speak out. Let the use of words teach us their meaning. That’s Wittgenstein again.

How are you getting on? Are we singing off the same hymn sheet? Singing, signing. Are we colluding, occluding, concluding? You have the right to remain silent. Sue MacLaine has chosen to waive that right. To wave. That’s right. Not waving but drowning (past). Not drowning but waving (present). Sending a sign, a signal, a signifier.  A message in a bottle from the future to her past self. Speak up! Bravo! A brave, bold, beautiful show.

Can I Start Again Please is a Sick! Festival commission. It plays at Summerhall every day in August except Mondays, 14.50