Focus Group is an adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s short story Mister Squishy, and follows protagonist Terry (Terry O’Donovan) as he reaches toward his sense of aggrieved occlusion. We, the audience, have been invited to participate in a focus group, carried out by Terry’s market research company on behalf of a major cake manufacturer (in the short story this is the titular Mister Squishy, for the play it is the ubiquitous Mr. Kipling).

Focus Group opens, like its source text, in mid-flow, with corporate types playing ping pong in their office. Augmenting the game is the everyday negotiation that goes on between colleagues – and those who want to be more than colleagues – shouted across the table with every swing of the paddle. The audience following this are seated across from each other, much like in an actual tennis match, in bleacher type seating on either side of the performance space.

In between the central performance of rec room interactions, wordless montages, abstract tableaux, microwave meals for one, and actors hovering on the sidelines wearing a tiger’s head, the audience do actually participate in a parody of a focus group. The need for the audience to commit to this is stressed, although it seems likely that blank-faced silence from us would result in exactly the same show.  We are played off against each other on either side, with the main character addressing one half while one of his colleagues talks about him to the other half. That creeping notion that everyone is discussing you and laughing at you behind your back? Oh, it’s true.  Meanwhile, the back and forth of the ping pong games highlights the protagonist’s utter inability to connect with other humans – whether as friends or lovers. He’s just firing words at people across a room and expecting something more than more words in return.

Certain sequences presenting snapshots into the characters’ inner lives are well choreographed and artfully framed, presenting unguarded moments of tranquility and boredom and despair. Some are literal: a woman curls up in a chair and quietly reads a book, a man chooses between shirts. Others imaginary: Terry’s alpha-male colleague and rival pinned under the board room table, a concoction being brewed in a home lab. The montage technique gives a strong sense of the passing of time, and lends some much-needed lyricism to the bright yet brittle fakery of the rest of the action. The significance of the tiger head never becomes explicit.

The participatory element of the experience has the potential to be funny or awkward, with very little lead given by the cast. The answers elicited from the group are never incorporated, or even referenced again, so it feels like those parts might as well be scripted, or not happen at all.  Asides do highlight just how meaningless the story’s focus groups are, though. (We learn that the fictional company our characters work for carefully targets its participants and keeps asking the questions till they get the results their client wants). It’s a taste of the futility the protagonist feels at attempting individuality in the corporate machine.

The format is a break from convention, but at heart this is yet another story of a disaffected straight white man who feels betrayed by the sense of entitlement society has bestowed upon him. The plot twist is delivered so calmly and casually that it would be chilling if it hadn’t been so clearly signposted; that inevitability of outcome though, the inescapable subsuming of self within any socially-acceptable parameters, is at the very heart of the source material, so in that respect Focus Group hits its mark. An ostensibly flippant hour of theatre with a sobering undercurrent which we only glimpse throughout, until it breaks through at the last.

This performance incorporates theatre, musical theatre and visual theatre in a variety of styles to tell several stories, the main one being a young boy’s challenging coming of age to be a teenager. While his parents are going through an acrimonious split, he finds comfort in the fantasy worlds created by his grandmother, until, that is, she passes away. His mother, now struggling to raise the boy by herself, is concerned about his behaviour and books him to see a mental health professional who seems to delight in prescribing anti-psychotic medication and finally sectioning him.

A darkly gothic style in many ways, the set, costumes, props and puppets are all quite sinister.  The set is a cave and a series of concentric rings of cave mouth establish a claustrophobic atmosphere, and even before the set is revealed we have an opening monologue from a man who appears to be on the edge of a precipice. The curtains part to reveal the past where the Boy (who seems to have no other name), as a puppet, is desperately running, operated bunraku-style by three people.

The puppet is about two-thirds life size with a very large head in proportion to the body and even larger eyes in proportion to the other features of the face. Raven Kaliana’s design is very appropriate, as the boy is portrayed as a highly sensitive soul who speaks very strangely and doesn’t appear to connect to this world very well, presaging his descent into ‘madness’ that is central to the show. The puppet is operated and voiced by Zac Hamilton who does his best to hide behind it, particularly his face. This is a shame as it makes his voice a little too muffled and degrades his ability to have a precise eye-line with the puppet.

The scenes are presented in a large variety of styles; musical theatre, physical theatre (with masked chorus), straight drama, visual theatre. This creates a sense of never quite knowing what world we’re in and may reflect the Boy’s own uncertainties about fantasy from reality.  The presentations of the Grandmother’s stories, in which the Boy takes refuge, use a variety of puppetry techniques. Shadow sequences are particularly effective, some live and some projected from pre-recorded film. Some glove puppets, direct manipulation figures, and a string puppet are also used during the show but to far less effect, due to the open staging.

It is not easy to connect the elements of this performance together. The music and the songs are well arranged and delivered by the talented cast, but this isn’t a musical in which the plot is driven by the songs. Instead they provide a commentary on the events or present a sideline story. The fantastical stories use archetypes from fairytale and folklore that seem to refer to mother/son relations. The scenes between the boy and his teachers, his parents, and the doctor who medicates him are often quite naturalistic. There is no humour or lightness in any of the scenes which make the characters ultimately feel distant and hard to relate to and this is compounded by the lack of insight offered as to what drives them, so it is difficult to care sufficiently about their suffering.

The cast are all talented singers and performers, well trained and able. Anya Hamilton (as the Mother) in particular shows a level of detail and strength in both acting and singing. This production is written, produced and lit by Adrian Sandvaer who despite crediting two co-writers (Ragnhild Kristoffersen and Gabriel Owen) hasn’t quite managed to create a satisfying narrative. The narration describes the show’s tale as ‘A story so sad and so wrong that it breaks your heart to hear it’, a description which for me sitting in the audience rang out loud and clear.

Like a classic old lady from the woods in a fairy tale, wicker basket on arm, headscarf, dark shawl, and in front of a circular projection of twigs brushing a cloudy sky, Lizzie addresses us. She tells us she is ‘old now, of no use but to tell stories’. She lets us in on ancient-sounding bits of wisdom such as ‘the grain knows what the wheat doesn’t,’ that ‘the grain is waiting quietly,’ and how we are ‘leading tiny lives that flicker, and then are gone.’ Then… before our very eyes, Lizzie transforms, shedding her scarf, shawl, and crone attire to become a contemporary girl. This is a moment of magic.

Moon Tales is a solo show, performed by its writer Kate Darach. Inspired by the old names for the full moons, from Hunter’s Moon to Harvest Moon, these thirteen interwoven vignettes are female voices from across time and place, telling bittersweet universal stories from the ‘burbs of Johannesburg to medieval Yorkshire, eloquent, dark, sometimes funny; tales of lifelong secrets, sex, regret, desire, hope. Female portraits – many of them linked by the theme of motherhood – capturing the diversity, commonality, and eternity of the female experience.

So now we meet a young woman who likes men, and she likes sex… she knows what she likes and how to get it. She doesn’t need a man to fulfil any void, instead she demands men ‘Fill me, not fulfil me.’ We progress to listening to a woman in therapy, talking about her pregnant sister in law, and how she wants to ask to have that baby, as she knows her sister in law doesn’t want it. There are swift transitions, with changes of projected image onto the moonlike screen, for instance the full moon juxtaposed with a tower block at night. A snippet of a tune is played and within it there’s a change of character. Now we meet Bad Kitty, a chair used as her computer screen. Kitty announces ‘badkitty.com: you pay, we play, Kitty’ll display.’ Yet her ‘business hours’ are interrupted by a phone call from her mother.

Moon Tales’ characters are bold, succinct and evocative. Other memorable women we meet include the young Indian bride-to-be, who speaks of ‘flowers rotting away invisibly, and you cannot tell’. She transforms into Mary in the stable; into the young gay woman, accompanied by a Smiths tune and projection of cherry blossom, which slips into an image of a human embryo to accompany the woman who self-harms who wishes to be held and helpless. She speaks of the emergency flare that is sent up, which doesn’t mean that the ship is sinking, and states ‘I win, when I lose.’ The final character returns us to Lizzie once more… not in her hunched crone form, as the young maiden, full of hope and possibility.

The writing is magnificent – clear and essential, bringing to life multidimensional lives, different faces and fears, loves and desires… and aloneness. The performance is stunning in its vivacity, astuteness, and commitment to character.

I felt that the staging – in raked seating looking down onto the performance – wasn’t arranged in the best way for the show as we were. Something more intimate would have supported the material better: it’s less powerful being told stories when you’re being looked up to, and in such a large space, a microphone would have been of benefit.

I had quite a few expectations going into Made Visible, but I wasn’t anticipating that it would be wry, and funny. The humour is the play’s saving grace as it retreads a conversation which in real life often threatens to disappear up its own handwringing white angst. In short, it is a dramatisation of a conversation writer Deborah Pearson had with a stranger on a park bench. A stranger who happened to be an older Asian woman in a sari. Beyond that, it’s a discussion about how white people don’t know how to talk about racism. There are endless reams of discourse about race. About interaction between races. About our involuntary racism. About the invisibility of whiteness. The crisis of how to say something meaningful about all that is the issue to which the play addresses itself.

Deborah Pearson’s incredibly self-aware play – a text in constant debate with itself, questioning the validity of its own existence – doesn’t exactly say anything new, but it does interrogate what we already know (whether we admit it or not) and it does manage, through showing or by stating all those things we tell ourselves about why we react to people the way we do, to trick its characters into being inadvertently honest. Pearson is known for her commitment to fringe theatre and has been nominated for a Total Theatre Innovation Award (and won many others) and she has been listed as one of the most influential people in UK theatre – so this is a woman with a voice, who knows she can be heard, and that context is very relevant when looking at who gets to speak and how much during Made Visible. (Spoiler: For once it isn’t the middle class white people.) Furthermore, she has written on the politics of narrative in theatre, so presenting her thoughts in this way is a very considered choice, calculated to be culturally effective.

An awareness of context makes the experience of Made Visible richer. Understanding the conversation Pearson is portraying allows us to laugh at the tropes, at the rhetorical knots people will tie themselves in to avoid saying the wrong thing, and the awful platitudes people come out with when confronted with a race or culture they’re not entirely familiar or comfortable with. The two Asian actors often seemingly stroll out of the fourth wall to interrogate the ‘Deborah’ character and the text – a device that belies Pearson’s own thought process in justifying putting this play on in the first place. It’s satisfying to see many of my objections to or quibbles with the main text acknowledged by the people within the Made Visible world and examined if not resolved.

One of the most interesting things the ‘Deborah’ character says as she tries to justify her play to the other actors onstage is that maybe the central event, the conversation with a stranger on a bench, was significant to that woman too because she didn’t often have an in-depth interaction with young white women. From this misplaced but not entirely unreasonable starting notion, she escalates out to the idea that ethnic minorities can ostracise and even dominate white people. That classic false equivalence is the very thing that derails every equality argument time and again, the idea that an exploited group kicking back at a dominant group is ‘the same thing’ as the systemic oppression they have faced for however many generations. It is a comforting argument for people who resent anyone trying to acquire what they have by virtue of birth, but also to people who feel guilty about having what others do not but don’t know how to rectify it. Recognising this and portraying it in a way we can laugh along with whilst still seeing the fallacy is the true success of Made Visible.

Actors of different races, cast to play race-specific roles, switching characters mid-show isn’t a groundbreaking device, but it was unexpected and effective. I felt more comfortable hearing an Asian woman recounting a story about being a white woman who is suspicious of some Middle Eastern men on a plane than I would have been hearing it from a woman I was reading as white, which was probably the point. The voices of white people always dominate conversations on race – their experiences and observations intrinsically deemed more valid than those of ethnic minorities. Pearson has clearly taken this on board and made the choice to give the voice to characters other than her own onstage proxy. They are still speaking her words though, that is the crux.

A few notes on the production: The lighting design is spare and stark and it’s effective. It’s married carefully with design to lead us into and out of ‘the play’ and the meta-world of self-reprobation and cross examination that frames it. The set is storybook tokenistic and quite charming, lending a whimsical air to the environment. The exposed wings, the brilliant white brick walls of the Yard (a nightmare to light but entirely appropriate for this piece), lurid coloured LED strips and the set of bold Perspex flats and parodic mocked-up park benches and pond create the ideal environment for a chronically meta-analytical piece of theatre about exposing hidden truths and self-examination. The space was perfectly suited to the content, so much so that it could almost be site-responsive. It will be interesting to see how Made Visible fares in other venues.

The subject matter is familiar and a solution isn’t really forthcoming (could it be?), but the execution is warmly self-critical and genuinely funny, enough so that the inherent egotism of making a play about how you feel about being white can still make for an entertaining hour.

Something Something Lazarus, a title you always have to confirm is the actual title whenever you talk about it, is ostensibly a musical, but one which interrupts its form.  The show is structured around the Midnight Sun, an ailing cabaret club, and a setting much like the King’s Head venue it takes place in. The rehearsals of songs about something (resurrection, for example), become a hyper-symbolic dreamscape where the singing of the song is the action itself. (Say, raising the dead. For example.) The music is intrinsic to the characters and their interactions, it is their language and does more than sound pleasing – as much as dance is more than just movement and tells more than a story. Unlike a traditional musical Lazarus seeks to disrupt narrative, and neat segues, and present something confrontational.

Much of the music is almost-familiar and, like all good cabaret, highly referential. It felt like the headliner should be a jaded, ageing drag artist to truly embody the spirit of the place. The eponymous broken cabaret itself (performed inside sugar-daddy club-owner Daniel’s head) is akin to Jonathan Larson or John Cameron Mitchell as directed by David Lynch, and complimentary Elaine Paige stickers adorn the patron’s chests. So much of Something Something Lazarus, when it moves on from the slightly stilted realism of the introductory scene, feels like someone trying to scratch an idea out of their head, like a composer noodling on their piano, an artist furiously sketching pages and tearing each one off onto a pile on the floor, already scribbling on the next clean sheet with the impressions of the one before scarring the paper, and as young agitator Jay tells us when a scene doesn’t quite go to plan ‘this is cabaret. If you wanted the Royal Court you should have fucking gone there.’ Quite.

It does take too long to get going, to launch into its main conceit, but once it does I was consistently thrilled.  The set pieces and narrative devices are maybe not as innovative as the company might like to think, but they are compellingly executed. The majority of the music is performed by the cast and the arrangements and musical direction are the true strength of Something Something Lazarus and the element that really sets it apart from its contemporaries. Setting a show inside a character’s head allows for philosophical abstraction. Using time as a structuring device and conveying it in literal and metaphorical ways, yes these are things we have seen, things which work – but what really elevates this play, and the sometimes carelessly written dialogue, is the way music saturates every interaction. You know the way a song can make you feel like you’re in a story, the swell of possibility in your chest as you listen to something that speaks to you? Here that singular and personal experience is made manifest and accessible as a shared moment – a liminal moment, stretched out beyond the seconds it occurs for and into the virtual. Despite the tension of the narrative, when the full company perform an ever-escalating, passion-revealing number together, it borders on euphoric.

The raw aspects, carefully orchestrated though most of them are, feel honest despite the subterfuge and the encyclopaedia of unspoken tensions and resentments and loves and disappointments. The character who seems the most superficial and vain transpires to be the most emotionally developed in a world where, as the song tells us ‘Every heart ends up as meat.’

However, the artifice of the production is paradoxically highlighted by the life given to the characters outside of the tiny back room of the King’s Head. The world of the Midnight Sun extends far beyond the scope of that humid performance space into the potentially infinite online.  In a concept they’ve ambitiously dubbed ‘transmedia’, Broken Cabaret have given their production a presence in the real (virtual) world. Their characters have personas, on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, the club has a fully functional website. To the producers this seems to be the most important facet of what sets Lazarus apart, and while that additional dimension was definitely entertaining, the production certainly stands without it. Which is fortunate as it seemed a number of the audience, certainly on the night I attended, were not aware of the wealth of supplementary online material.

The climactic musical number, a multilayered, multi-instrumental tennis match, Duelling Banjos with lives at stake, is funny and fraught and musically accomplished and honestly everything I could want from cabaret.  From the first note of this song I was rapt.  It was supported by a brilliant lighting design that created depth in a few square feet of floor and made judicious use of strobe. The isolated but perfectly pitched instances of choreography complemented the themes of time and control – and the escalation of both drama and musicality – faultlessly. The sparing use of clearly choreographed movement is a mature and effective choice and when the cast are transfigured into ticking automata before spiralling into something far more primal, it is rightly rewarding.

My only real criticism is that the show ends so abruptly. That jagged edge needs either polishing or sharpening somehow. I don’t think Something Something Lazarus has quite arrived yet, but it is undoubtedly going somewhere and I’ll be back to see it happen.