If one could take a dream, a fevered reverie of tensions and motions contriving towards some purpose or resolution, and somehow arrest the whole before the morning arrived with light, reason and coherence…

If one might then take the resulting chaos of ideas and impulses, synaptic fireworks, macro visualisations, unresolved lines, gravitational and geometrical impossibilities, and freeze the whole prospect in an instant before casting it entirely in concrete…

One may find oneself in an approximation of Hinterland.

The analogy is apt. St Peter’s Seminary, one of the few surviving masterpieces of British post-war modernist brutalist architecture, was commissioned by the Catholic church and designed by the architectural pairing of a Scottish presbytarian (Andy MacMillan) and an atheist, German/Polish Jew (Isi Metzstein). Upon the building’s eventual completion in 1966, the Catholic church – who had intended it for the instruction of priests – had determined that the priests might be better instructed within the contexts of the communities they were training to serve. The building, a Corbusian epic of post war optimism, was obsolete before the doors opened.

The church eventually abandoned the space in the 1980s. The cruel, wet Scottish winters asserted their grip, and a fire in the accompanying Kilmahew House accelerated the ruin.  Already there was little left beyond the imposing concrete shell when, in 2005, the Category A listed building was declared, by Prospect magazine, as Scotland’s Greatest Post-WWII building.

Then in 2015, the building was placed into the hands of art activist Angus Farquhar who has embarked upon a gargantuan quest to invoke the spirit of the Greek agora. The seminary will become, in time, a forum for debate, exploration, and creativity. An ‘engine for constructive human activity’ concerning the universe and the divine.

Hinterland is a principal waypoint in Farquhar’s journey, though NVA, the environmental arts organisation he founded as an environmental offshoot to his influential industrial music group Test Dept in 1992, has been doggedly pursuing ideas, funds, concepts, and solutions for the site since 2009.

It is entirely appropriate, then, that this waypoint is dedicated to the space itself and what it has become: a dream caught in limbo and out of time, a ruin, a calcified monument to the failed vision of a fair and just post-war society, decaying under the superficial and meaningless heritage certifications and listings of worth and merit and value.

And how does it manifest, this moment? Well, as a dream, of course.

The evening light dies in the western sky and we are driven from the pier in Helensburgh towards Cardross. Across the dark cut of the Clyde glimmer the lights of Greenock. We turn sharply and ascend a dirt track into woodland, illuminated by the occasional arc light.

We are each handed light sticks to help guide our path, and then, entering deeper into the woods, travelling through tunnels of branches woven into pagan shrines, and mindful of the fragments of choral melody rising out of the darkness ahead, we cross the threshold into Hinterland.

Like Kafka’s castle, the seminary looms out of the dark, giving nothing away of its true scale, or how it actually works. Where is it planted in the ground? How does one get in?

Kindly volunteers point their light sticks and show us how to enter the space. But once inside the mysteries only deepen. These are rooms with no sense or reason. Walls do not meet, ceilings seem to hang, impossibly, in the air. Just on the cusp of feeling oneself to be in a closed space, a look upwards, beyond the concrete scoops and parallel beams, one sees the stars. Steps descend into curious nooks and wells, lit by candles on numerous plinths and altars, illuminating decades of graffiti, as well as the damp streaks and mossy tendrils of neglect.

Farquhar’s great challenge, and that of his team of collaborative artists and technicians – including visual director James Johnson and lighting designer Phil Supple (whose craft easily lives up to his name) – was to remain, in a sense, passive. It was their role here to benignly afford the building its chance to speak in its own language. To speak of its purpose. To speak of its design and construction.

Using the pixel mapping talents of Adam Finlay, Novak, Keith Daniels and Elliot Thomson, animated blueprints are projected onto the building’s interior shell, whilst welders’ arc-lights – an installation episode from Dav Bernard and Zephyr Liddell – cast flickering strobes of shadow across the vaulted central hall.

Deeper into the hall itself, Robbie Thomson’s thurible swings over a black, deeply empty space. One cannot immediately tell whether the space descends deep into the building until a light suggests a surface. Realising that there is water in the pool, however, does not fix the scene. How deep is the water? What is, or was, the function of this room? Is it, in fact, a room? After all, there seems to be so much night sky appearing between these staircases ascending to… where?

The welders hang up their visors and step out onto the water. There is a sudden moment of sad realisation that the pool is a stagnating puddle of rainfall. Bede Williams’s trumpet blasts out isolated notes that reverberate around the space, and flow into the disembodied voices provided by St Salvator’s Chapel choir. For a moment, Rory Boyle’s composition work and subsequent manipulation by Alistair MacDonald, which was on occasion prone to be a little too benign within the setting, seems like an anguished cry.

Farquhar’s greatest achievement is to make it this far with a site and structure over which the rest of society has effectively given up the ghost. That NVA has managed to articulate the process to this point where one can imagine their pulling together these exploded elements of frozen, failed and unrealised dreams into a cohesive, culturally nourishing enterprise is laudable. What is truly extraordinary, however, is the combination of determination and restraint that pervaded every second of the Hinterland experience: defined more by shadow and mystery than by light, informed by inspirational sparks seeking continuity and cohesion in the midst of darkness, visited by huddled souls seeking hope and inspiration…

Amidst these ruins, a determinedly secular humanist approach seems set to tackle contemporary societal issues in a manner that borders the divine.

In their latest offering, Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare, Forced Entertainment continue to explore their fascination with storytelling, presented here in its purest form. It’s no mean feat: 36 plays over six days, shared between six performers. Forced Entertainment are no strangers to this sort of durational experiment – those familiar with their work will note their improvised project Quizoola, regularly performed over 6 or 24 hours, demanding the performers to answer and ask a constant barrage of questions. However, there is something altogether more wholesome, and certainly more accessible about their latest musings.

Included as part of the Shakespeare weekender at the Barbican, the Pit theatre was simply set with two packed pantry shelves, neatly framing a simple wooden table centre-stage. Immediate intrigue is provoked in an audience of all ages, as condiments, egg cups and other knick-knacks are carefully positioned by the table, ready for the ensuing play.

I caught four of the 36 plays – Julius Caesar (Robin Arthur), Merry Wives of Windsor (Terry O’Connor), Troilus and Cressida (Jerry Killick), and Antony and Cleopatra (Cathy Naden).

The premise is simple and the same basic structure is used for every play, but each offers something quite unique. Each narrator starts out by plotting the course of their play with the help of a specific group of household items, each one representing a character. The table top becomes the stage, sugar-shakers and marmite pots the players. It isn’t Shakespeare as we know it: no iambic pentameter or soliloquising, but a bare-bones oration of character, motive and plot.

The stories unfold, and the performers demonstrate a virtuosity for storytelling. We hang on every word, even if we’re familiar with the story. The stories are enriched in the retelling as the playful performers each bring their own persona into the mix. It is a familiar trait of FE’s work, allowing the natural traits of the actor to inform their performances.

It is an object theatre of sorts, but it is important to establish here that we are not witnessing object manipulation in the usual sense of this term. There is very little personifying of the bottles and tins on the table, and no illusion that these objects are something meta- it is more like watching a graphic score unfold, or battle plans being discussed. The objects are signifiers to the characters’ presence, and occasionally their movement, but rarely do they actually move. Having said this, the object assignment to each character has clear motives. Caesar, for example, is played by a large bottle of olive oil, considerably bigger and more luxurious than any other character in the play. In contrast, servants and maids are played by the more menial objects from the pantry – tiny salt-shakers, bobbins and eggcups. Cleopatra is later embodied by a delicate, ornate china cup, far more elegant than any object thus far, and by far the most fragile (fickle). Assimilating the objects in this way aids in the delivery of humour, context and subtext.

Throughout the performances there are moments of pure joy: O’Connor’s treatment of the bumbling Falstaff (a rotund bottle of sherry) is a perfect example. She is intrigued by her own storytelling, excited, occasionally falling over her own words, mirroring the farce at play. Robin Arthur by contrast delivers some of the most poignant and delicately crafter friezes: his gaze and piercing focus upon the characters is emotionally transfixing. It is reminiscent of his precise craftsmanship in Forced Entertainment’s earlier work, The Notebook.

Complete Works may lack the usual romp and vigour of FE’s more experimental large-scale works, but it still bares one trademark of Etchells’ meticulous direction: keep nought that is unnecessary. The clarity and simplicity is the triumph of this project, a demonstration of theatrical storytelling at its best.

Two robust, muscular, black men compete on a Nintendo Wii as the audience trickle in, feeling like voyeurs entering someone else’s home. Performers Soloman Israel and Samuel Nicholas inhabit a comfortable and homely set, designed on an axis, cleverly incorporating two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen. The partitions come to a point at centre stage where figures weave in and out of doors and openings that reveal intimate night time scenes and hide them when the break of daylight transforms transparent gauze windows into opaque wallpaper. A stopped clock reminds us both of the transience of time and of time standing still within these four intercepting walls.

The strongest character in the piece is the absent mother, whose voice by Michelle Asante echoes through an answer phone recording. We follow father and son (Israel and Nicholas) through a linear narrative of grief, written and directed by Natalie Ibu. Each scene depicts a recollection of memories and the difficulty in attempting to carry out an everyday chore whilst burdened by intense emotion. Father and son perform in parallel, either in entirely opposing worlds, unintentionally disrupting each other’s routines, or working together in mutual appreciation of their personal journeys.

The narrative carefully depicts scenes that anyone who has any sense of love or loss will easily recognise in their own stories. Making the table for dinner, boiling the kettle for tea, and going to bed are moments that are chosen thoughtfully for their mundane banality and framed as absolute hurdles to be overcome through new ritualistic habits. Particular movements are highlighted by an intuitive soundtrack that projects the everyday into extreme focus. Helen Skiera’s composition of worldly noises and abstract sounds invoke the piercing enormity of simple actions that forms a constant theme throughout.

A powerful dance solo by Nicholas emerging from washing in the bathroom is charged with energy as we watch a sudden burst of sharp isolations from behind. Cleansing turns into fighting as repetitious washing gestures, jumps, and leaps fill the spot where he stands before the mirror with a sense of bursting frustration. Repeating this for longer might allow a tiny snapshot to become more powerful.  The breathy, rhythmic, beat-boxing panic attack ends before it becomes scary or absorbing.  The stark reminder of death by drawing around objects with white chalk happens only once. Staccato isolations performed in silhouette behind the gauze, the rearranging of the table, the use of sign language, all burst with complex everyday and dance vocabularies that are intriguing to watch, full of content, and over all too quickly, before they fully transform into ritual.

The best and most poignant moments in this piece are sporadic, making it feel bitty and over descriptive, when Israel and Nicholas have the physicality and expressive qualities to perform to a more physical extreme and point of exhaustion. A shift away from naturalism and towards the physical embodiment of emotion and ritual, already there in the dance phrases, would take this piece to a powerful, unsettling, unnerving and emotive highpoint.  Take away the set, limit the endless props to a sheet, a mug, and a piece of white chalk, and set the task of performing the entire piece with the body – two men, two solo figures, one duet. This would transform the work from a naturalistic interpretation with a splattering of movement to one that maximises the emotive content of the complex physical vocabulary already there.

As it stands, i know all the secrets in my world describes with humour and care the isolation and ownership of pain. Through disruption of each other’s rituals, each character’s pain is their own. Pain is timeless, chronic, but passable with humour, humanity, and a father/son bond. Israel’s powerful duet as father with his wife’s dress draws the piece to a memorable close. Washing, wearing, fighting, worshiping, carrying, wringing, screwing up, and finally cloaking himself in this white cotton shift: father dons the wings of an angel or the cloak of a superhero and finally manages to lay the table with his son.

Rhiannon Faith’s Scary Shit is a collaboration with Maddy Morgan and psychotherapist Joy Griffiths. Faith and Morgan’s performance draws on autobiographical subject matter that emerged during therapy sessions as part of the creative process. The duo uncover a darker side of womanhood that is rarely thrown into light with such disarming honesty, facilitated by their ever-evolving and empowering friendship.

A little tipsy and a little befuddled, the audience are confronted by an abundance of fluffy pink props in a trashy engendering of space. At this point it could go either way as both Morgan and Faith repeatedly break out of the fourth wall, explaining the decisions and meanings behind each of their interrupted, or ‘failed’ performance phrases. As Morgan painstakingly pumps air from a foot pump into Faith’s face mask at her command, I wonder if a codependent relationship will unfold. They boss each other about, helping and hindering in a way that reveals the motives behind each friend’s actions. Their dysfunctional relationship translates well into a dysfunctional performance. The true success is how both performance and friendship evolve into an honest and moving embodiment of womanhood, affecting for both male and female audience members.

The show is structured by a series of vignettes in which the duo alternate between starring and supporting roles. Each section is formed around a subject that arose in therapy and is framed by thoughtless antics or the authoritative voice of psychotherapist Joy Griffiths from recorded sessions. Scenes are named around fears: Fight or Flight, Knot Dance, Phone Dump, Scary Shag, I Haven’t Had My Smear Test. The reliving of autobiographical narratives creates a purging or rewriting of memories in a phenomenological sense. On talking to Faith she explains how the exhausting climaxes appear at different points in the show on different nights according to her own emotions in the moment.

After a scrappy start, as Morgan begins to dance, these girls mean business. The Knot Dance translates sailor’s knots to anxious tummy knots to a vivid depiction of the physicality of infertility. Morgan’s evocative dance phrases tantalise the audience in snippets and give integrity to the performance. With each one, we feel her pain, frustration, and confusion at the topic in hand. Their gravity is made stronger by their framing. Faith’s set-up using humour, silliness, and storytelling makes for a powerfully revealing form. When one dance phrase is repeated, the second time with the addition of Faith’s narration, the I Haven’t Had My Smear Test poem transforms from an abrupt and aggressive series of gestures into a dynamic expression of irrational fears and complex imagery.

Transitional moments for the pair’s friendship arise when Morgan abandons her role as Faith’s assistant on stage. We see her vulnerability, which Faith is also forced to consider. The suspended balloon tied in rope, like a buoy, shields Morgan’s face while Faith has to lie on the floor to speak into the abandoned microphone. Dancing behind the buoy creates a sense of anonymity: Morgan’s head is replaced by knots of rope in a struggle to identify what or how she feels. Shaking, twitching and wringing hands morph into acutely nuanced tremors that run through Morgan’s body into an articulate movement vocabulary when her voice fails her.

By frankly recalling real experiences both serious and trivial, their consequences are heightened. The result of thanking someone for an unwanted dry-hump, for example, throws into stark reality the social constructs that created both this action and the response to it. The piece is full of content that prompts viewers to question gender roles in society. It appeals to every woman and hopefully opens the eyes of every man. Dedicated to their cause, Faith and Morgan continue this interrogation at the bar, drawing unlikely people together in frank conversations as the night draws in. I am left with a powerfully abiding image of the pair sat on their pink bench after Morgan’s eventual break down. Out of nowhere, in the highlight of a breath, their bodies, slightly tilted to one side in perfect harmony, are so in tune that for those few seconds I hold my breath with them too.