Leixlip, County Kildare, Ireland. The year is 2000, the start of a new century – although here is a news story that is almost Medieval. Four women die in a suicide pact. They are 83-year-old Frances Mulhooney and her three nieces, Josephine (46) and the 51-year-old twins Brigid Ruth and Catherine. The women barricade themselves into a house and, over a period of around 40 days, starve themselves to death. The last time any of them were seen in public was when two of the sisters, Catherine and Josephine, went on a shopping trip to St Stephen’s Green in Dublin. Brigid Ruth left letters in the house, expressing doubts about what they were doing.

These are the bare facts. We weren’t there. We don’t know what they said. This is not their story. This is many years later, and here we have Anglo-Irish theatre company Dead Centre finding a way to reflect on the story that tries to bring something to the stage other than journalistic investigation. As Bush Moukarzel (writer/performer/co-director) puts it, we are not here to find the truth, nor to create a sensationalist thriller. We are here to reflect on the bare facts, and to allow our imaginations to run wild. To think about the unthinkable – death – and to know, to really know, that no matter when, no matter what the circumstances, we will all one day face death, alone. Black. No return. Nothing.

Dead Centre theatre company take the bare facts of the case and turn them into an extraordinary theatre piece that, rather than search for meaning, explores meaninglessness and the spaces in between the facts. They describe their piece as a wake – a tribute to the women that honours (rather than explains) their bizarre and unfathomable decision to die in such a terrible way. Although there are no conclusions to be made, there is a strong suggestion that the desire to shake off this mortal coil is sparked by an obsession with Catholic stories of martyrdom, fasting, and the denial of the body’s needs; and driven by a desire to ‘shrug off the overcoat’ of physicality in order to reach heaven as soon as possible. Death, unfortunately, takes its time. In the time it takes them to die, there is an obvious and heartbreaking analogy to Christ’s 40 days in the desert, and the 40 days of Lent. ‘None of us could have foreseen our deaths would be so cruel and slow’ says Brigid Ruth. Which may or may not be something she said in one of her letters.

This is a theatre of design: a collage of fantastic (in both senses of the word) moving pictures; a theatre in which objects take on magical powers. One known fact – that one of the women’s bodies was found in the kitchen, surrounded by bin bags – becomes the source of the central scenographic image of the show: four figures sleepwalking through a landscape of tables, chairs, bags, and scattered paper, crockery, and garbage. I like the onstage division between the ‘real’ world and the Leixlip house. Visual images are powerful, haunting. A back wall is chalked with the outlines of human figures, like ghosts that watch the action. Rain drips then pours in a deluge into a bucket. A china cup is chewed, drawing blood. A leaf-blower blows shredded paper around the stage. A vase smashes: ‘I’ve had enough of dead flowers’ says a sister.

It is also a theatre that uses words in strange and wonderful ways. The role that a lip-reader played in the police investigation is seized on as a motif that permeates the whole show – apparently lip-readers are regularly employed to ‘read’ CCTV footage, and in this case that final shopping outing is scrutinised and deconstructed, the ‘lip-reader’ character then going on to become a kind of intruder-witness to the women’s deaths, mouthing words that they may or may not have said. ‘Wait, it didn’t happen like this, I didn’t say this’ says one of the women. ‘I’m sorry, I was only trying to help’ says the lip-reader. One whole long section of a filmed close-up of lips has echoes of Beckett’s Not I. Brigid Ruth’s letters – presented verbatim, possibly, are texts that both enlighten and add further mystery. Some are poetic: ‘I believe we all of us, every single soul, has a karmic debt to pay off (me included)’ and some are prosaic: ‘Let’s think of exiting ourselves humanely…save ourselves a slow and painful hell.’

And this is a theatre in which sound design is not merely decorative, it is integral to the dramaturgy of the piece. As the four women and the lip-reader negotiate their way through the terrible green-lit dreamscape kitchen, a deep throbbing bass sound, deep enough to be felt in the stomach, shakes the room. ‘Found sound’ includes country music classic Home is Where You’re Happy and Elvis Presley’s Crying in the Chapel. Played straight, slowed down, sung along to. Sound designer Adam Welsh is a co-founder of the company, and appears onstage playing ‘Adam the Technician’.

The third core member of Dead Centre is c0-director Ben Kidd – who must have had his work cut out for him balancing so many disparate elements – text, physical action, visual imagery, sound –a job he has done very well for the most part. The show also credits ‘cameo writer’ Mark O’Halloran, an established screenwriter – and indeed it is a very filmic piece of theatre.

There are some criticisms: occasionally the piece is tripped up by its postmodern meta-theatre elements. I dislike the beginning – a mock post-show discussion. I understand the need to find a way theatrically to present the facts of the case before we spin off into the world of the four women, but this set-up for me doesn’t work well. I do, though, enjoy the performative ‘interval’ where, in place of a real interval, we are treated to a minute or two of the lip-reader ‘relaxing’.

Formed in 2012 in Dublin, Dead Centre are on their third production. They come to Scotland with a raft of accolades from the Dublin Fringe, where Lippy premiered in 2013. It is unusual to come across work this ambitious from young companies based in the UK or Ireland – an exceptional piece, despite some flaws.

Lippy is shortlisted for a Total Theatre Award 2014 for Innovation & Experimentation. 

In which Pinocchio, the ‘prince of porkies’, now a middle-aged man in a tired tuxedo and Brylcreemed hair, tells us the truth about his life – if we are ready, willing and able to believe him.

And thus the well-known tale is retold by a five-strong team of vaudevillians – four actor-clowns, and a musician who plays a variety of instruments, including the intrinsically clownish melodeon. The musician also occasionally gets drawn into the physical action, to up ensemble numbers where needed.

For reasons not immediately clear to me – although I later guess that it is perhaps to set up the postmodern notion that Pinocchio’s story is one that mixes truth and lies, so how do we trust even the writer of the tale? – we learn that the puppet-boy is not, as we had been told, carved from a piece of wood by his father, but given birth to by a real live mother. Cue comedy birthing scene, never a highlight of any show (although the motherly waltz with a log of wood is tenderly funny).

But it gets better from there on in, as all the familiar elements of the story are revisited, with our point of view switching from older fleshed-out Pinocchio and his younger (puppet) self. The encounter with the Fox and the Cat is played out with merry banter and music hall aplomb; and the various appearances of the Blue Fairy portrayed very nicely by a white-faced young woman clown who has a perfect air of whimsicality.

There is a very sweet little shadow theatre scene that goes up a notch when the action moves onto a twirled umbrella – a lovely touch. For the most part, the ensemble give robust performances that incorporate elements of vaudeville, clown and commedia. The troupe appeared to be native English speakers (despite the company’s name), unless they were just very good at archetypal English accents – but why we have a ‘shut-uppa your face’ cod-Italian chef turning up to reinforce racial stereotypes I’m not quite sure…  As there was no programme for the show, all this will remain a mystery to me.

The ploy of playing some scenes ‘straight’ (that is, as told in the original novel), with invented new ones thrown in to surprise us, I suppose makes sense dramaturgically in a show that sets out to explore if truth matters and whether ‘lying makes everything better’ as the older Pinocchio claims. But the strength of the original story shines through in the fact that it is often the invented scenes that seem the weakest. The exception being the ending, which is a poignant and beautiful play on the ‘real’ versus ‘the make-believe’. Ultimately, the most obvious pretence can be as truthful as can be, and a handful of scattered paper flowers as heartbreaking as a river of blood.

Verdict: a jolly romp, and an interesting new take on the Pinocchio story that isn’t perfect, but enjoyable nonetheless. A good Fringe show; an hour well spent.

A big white yurt stands in a quiet Edinburgh square off the beaten track of the Fringe. This is the Chapiteau, and inside is a floor of soil and a circle of wooden benches. We are here for the circus – although this isn’t any sort of regular circus – it’s a piece of word-free circus theatre by French company T1J exploring the troubled childhood of sculptor Jephan de Villiers, whose work mostly takes the form of wood-carving. We know this last fact because someone announces it pre-show, in the midst of the housekeeping notes about mobile phones and photography.

Not ideal, as it is good to get one’s theatre content from the piece of theatre presented, not from a pre-show announcement. So it is hard to say whether that starting point and theme would have been clear or not without being told, as once told you know, and that is that. Perhaps it is because this sculptor is better known in France than in the UK so it is felt that we need this context? Anyway, no matter – what is clearly presented, using puppetry, acrobatics and visual imagery, is a story of a small child who wavers between wonder at the world and distress; an exploration of childhood joy and pain.

We start with an axe-man chopping into a large log – really chopping, pieces flying off into the audience. A puppeteer and her puppet (carved wood, attached to her feet, with her hands as his) appear. The puppet-boy is a kind of Pinocchio figure who is intrigued by his own wooden-ness and seems to want to become flesh and blood – stroking the leg of his puppeteer (Morgan Aimerie Robin) with obvious interest in the warm, living material that it is moulded from. The puppet-boy wanders round the space, peering through thick-lensed glasses at anything that takes his childish interest – my bag is stolen and rummaged through, my water given to someone else.  When his glasses drop off, he steals someone else’s.

Playing around and sometimes against the puppet-boy are a trio of acrobats, two men and a woman (Michael Pallandre, Adria Cordoncillo and Caroline Leroy), whose lifts and balances are enacted up close to the audience, giving everything an edgy feel. Perhaps because of our proximity, we really feel the relationship between earth and air in their work. Standing in a three-person column, they reach to the ceiling of the yurt, giant-like. Feet planted in spoil, head reaching to the sky. Tree branches, ropes and planks are brought into play – as is a creaking metal-framed hospital bed that comes hurtling into the space, and is the stage for a pretty distressing scene of puppet and puppeteer separation. This is a show about childhood, not a children’s show (the company programme advices 16+ although this isn’t upfront in the Fringe marketing) – although there are fair few young children in the audience, and they seem, on the surface anyway as there are no tearful exits, to be coping OK. Ah, the power of puppetry to tell harrowing tales in a safe way! There is also mask used – lovely carved round faces echoed in tiny sculptures placed in the soil.

The mix of puppetry and circus is an unusual one. It works, mostly – the skilled acrobatics playing out all the outer obstacles and inner worries of the child who is growing up in a violent world; the wooden boy puppeteered with tender care. The visual aesthetic of the piece is rough and earthy: Hessian, wood, unbleached calico, brown wool. And of course the soil, which by the end of the show covers the acrobats’ limbs.

I must also mention the live music – beautiful cello by Florence Sauveur. And my favourite moment from the show, when the acrobats carry her aloft, and she continues to play…

T1J (Theatre d’un Jour) are an established group, led by Patrick Masset – they’ve been going for 20 years and have played at festivals worldwide, including the acclaimed Festival d’Avignon. They seem to like eclectic mixes  – their next show will apparently be a mix of opera and circus.

Although I don’t see L’Enfant Qui as a wholly successful show – I’d have liked the dramaturgy developed so that we didn’t need an explanation of what we were about to see – I applaud it wholeheartedly for its ambition merging of form.

L’Enfant Qui is shortlisted for a Total Theatre Award for Circus at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2014.

A cacophonic darkly comic live collage. A piece of tomfoolery from the void. Their words, not mine, but they’ll do very nicely, thank you. Words are important in this piece: words begged, borrowed and stolen from a series of parlour games. Words as in Merz declamations. Dada rants. Concrete poetry. Percussive noises. Song. Words that play to and with the physical presence of the performers. Words, words, words, words, words. And animal noises. And indeed stuffed animals.

‘Stop Making Sense’ could be the Livingstones Kabinet catchphrase, as we are invited (through the crazily beautiful singing of talented musician and performer Pete Livingston) to Step out of Time. In KLIP words, phrases, sentences are pulled apart violently, as if by teams of wild horses. Hung, drawn and quartered, rather like the hock of ham we see swinging from on high. Cautionary tales and aphorisms (‘If a woman forgets the words to her lullaby and just sings “la la la”, her child will still sleep’). Tongue-twisters (‘Red lorry, yellow lorry’). Mundane or meaningful social talk (‘Why don’t you come home with me tonight?) All are not merely deconstructed but torn to shreds and reassembled. Words sung, words danced, words dallied with and batted around the stage from performer to performer.

And what performers! The four-strong ensemble, two women and two older men, are all great. Particularly the men – Scottish actor/singer Pete Livingstone and Danish actor Sven E Kristensen (a man of many talents – he is apparently also the creator of the theatre of neo-puppetry and a sound designer – although not of this show).  I could watch and listen to these two forever.

Objects are also important – objects physically presence in the performance space, and objects evoked through words. A hock of ham. A Pink thong on a middle-aged man. A blow-up green plastic alligator, the type children use in swimming pools. A stuffed chicken – as in taxidermy, not as in Sunday roast. What does go in the head of a chicken? Cue song. There are lots of songs. And dances. Dances using gestural movement motifs, featuring much play with clothing, that have echoes of Pina Bausch and Nigel Charnock, yet are very much their own thing. There is also a great big back-projection screen, helpfully announcing ‘first part’ and ‘next part’. A keyboard. A trumpet. Cube-masks with painted faces. Ropes. A harness.

There’s a lot of stuff. And a lot happens. A lot of incidences coincide. I’m interested to learn in the programme notes that Danish director/performer Nina Karels trained at Ecole Philippe Gaullier. It would never have crossed my mind that Gaullier’s work was an influence on this piece, but now you come to mention it – it makes sense. Or rather, it makes nonsense.

It’s all, like, totally total. Really, as total as you could imagine. An extraordinary piece, challenging if you are desperate to ‘understand’ what things mean. If, though, you enjoy the anarchic fight back that words and objects can offer to logic and semantics, or even if you just like people impersonating chickens and dropping their trousers to reveal unexpected underwear, then this is the show for you.

KLIP is shortlisted for a Total Theatre Award for Physical and Visual Performance at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2014.