And yet physical and multimedia company Precarious continue to tempt fate and get away with it. Like their 2008 triumph The Factory, anomie is pure techie eye candy. Six giant flatscreen TVs are the set and often parts of the performers, too, synchronising prerecorded and rotoscoped footage with live movement so the cast can appear to fall or step or crawl partially or fully inside the false-coloured world behind the screens. As if that wasn’t enough, precise projection onto gauze or plastic film creates eerily floating apparitions: flowers or shimmering green curtains of binary code. And it all works.

Unlike The Factory, however, anomie’s multimedia aspect limits, rather than enhances, its physical theatre aspect. There are too many long scenes of performers thrashing and squirming on mattresses with their heads inside television sets, and too few of the Gestic tableaux that made The Factory a statement, rather than a technical exercise. Anomie only comes close to equalling The Factory’s images of people packaged and stored like meat when it casts aside the screens in favour of tangible props, like the reams of shiny black videotape that entangle a camcorder voyeur, or the mattress through which two potential lovers blindly explore one another.

New physical theatre company Idle Motion embrace tangible props to create onstage imagery from the very beginning in their gentler, necessarily smaller-scale production Borges and I. Stacks of second-hand books litter the stage, and their torn, clipped, punched, removed and rebound pages tumble out to form silhouetted skylines, or combine to represent an aeroplane, or stack to form a treacherous spiral staircase for Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges to stumble around as he gradually loses his sight.

The play is a tearjerker without being maudlin, and the inventive use of books and their pages as props, characters and scenery pieces is consistently surprising and delightful, whereas anomie’s invention, while undeniably technically masterful, soon becomes repetitive. Which just goes to show: even if you can defy precedent and rely on your technology to work, you still can’t rely on it to carry your show for you.

Participatory companies not only have to tell a story or make an artistic statement; they’re also responsible for crowd control. As the style becomes more popular, more methods of crowd control emerge. From what I’ve seen so far, they fall into two broad categories: the carrot and the stick.

Belt Up (Nothing to see/hear), who remain my stand-out favourite company from Fringe 2008, lead the carrot-danglers. The cast of The Tartuffe – a revamped version of last year’s Red Room highlight – greet the audience while they’re still queueing and begin gently immersing them into the world of the play, in character but without getting too in-yer-face. At this point I was handed a hi-vis jacket and designated Health and Safety Officer, which was a set-up for a joke much further down the line, but which also began blurring the distinction between audience and performer.

The cast remain scattered throughout the audience as we enter the space and take up positions on a jumble of mattresses, armchairs and bedsteads. There’s a comfortable sense of being amongst friends. The raucous comedy of the play relaxes everyone further; the company’s infiltrators whisper conspiratorial asides to their closest neighbours; and by the time Orgon begins demanding volunteers it seems churlish not to leap obligingly up and play his first wife, or his daughter’s suitor.

The sticky end of the spectrum is characterised by a technique I think of as the Embarrassment Spotlight. I experienced it last year in the hands of Three’s Company, in Auditorium. Companies using it this year include double Fringe First award winners Ontroerend Goed, with Internal, and the slightly lower-profile Tickled Pig Productions, with Parents’ Evening.

The Embarrassment Spotlight harnesses the natural inclination of the audience not to take part, and turns it against one unfortunate individual. For example: the staff of Tickled Pig’s fictional jolly-hockey-sticks institution Aultyme High (billed as “the teachers you wish you’d had”) need a volunteer to take part in a dressing-up competition. After a brief and awkward period of optimistically waiting for genuine volunteers, the cast pick a likely individual themselves and exhort him or her to join in. The combined relief of every other audience member at not being picked on themselves then prevents the nominee from refusing. If they resist, their party (and even complete strangers) will urge them to “go on” or “live a little,” safe in the knowledge that if the nominee lives a little they won’t have to (at least not in this scene).

Ontroerend Goed combine participatory with one-on-one performance, using a speed-dating format to isolate each participant with one performer, which removes the usual recourse (hoping a more gregarious audience member will volunteer first) and forces them to play ball or completely derail the performance.

Provided the company knows what they’re doing, both techniques are actually equally effective at persuading the audience onto their feet. People seem to enjoy themselves more chasing Belt Up’s carrot than avoiding Tickled Pig’s stick, but the two companies tailor their techniques to their dramatic aims. Belt Up aim to foster a sense of relaxed camaraderie, while Tickled Pig aim to recreate the terror and humiliation of a real parents’ evening. No one technique is empirically the best way of using an audience; the whole crowd control spectrum is a toolbox for participatory dramatists.

Coming up in Episode 3: Precarious / Idle Motion

Tommy Mullins plays Paul, a young army officer perfecting his comic techniques as a tool to extract information from Middle Eastern terror suspects, trained to resist torture by way of meditation. As ‘traditional’ interrogation methods fail, the UK Security Services enlist Paul along with a veteran comedian (Keith MacPherson ) to use humour as a means of unsettling the detainees’ resolve.

Mullins puts on a riveting show with his jump-cut-Chaplin-silent-movie style, and charms us with his stand-up-comedy scene routine. When he interacts with a member of the audience, we feel at ease; we’re in familiar ‘funny’ territory. Not so: because ‘good-cops’ play ‘bad cops’ too.

As Mullins tries to convince MacPherson of the ‘humanity’ of his weapon – humour – contrasting it with the ‘traditional’ torture methods of nail-pulling and waterboarding, we’re touched by his ‘humane’ values, but not for long. Humour, he elaborates, is a tool that remains undetected, it cannot be proven as a method of torture.

As the play evolves, so does the audience’s perception: our senses are bombarded from all sides with bright lights/sudden darkness/loud sounds and the macabre mingles with the funny and the surreal is at times rational. Humour is chaotic and humour is power too, Nunn seems to say, as we watch Paul’s descent into madness.

The conflict intensifies when we get a taste of Donald Pirie’s character as the sadistic officer. The (now) iconic Abu-Ghraib black hood takes centre stage and we shudder. Nunn pulls the writing off beautifully here with his rhetorical question: which would you rather have, laughter as weapon of interrogation or the black hood? What is the difference? And does it matter?

The makeshift staging, the amazing performance of the trio – Mullins, MacPherson and Pirie – and Tim Nunn’s powerful script make Funny a must-see, but not for the faint-hearted. Humour is power, power dis-empowers and we all choke on the realization of this. How ‘funny’ is that?

A series of photographs by London-based photographer, Adam Levy, on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2009 production of The Stronger by August Strindberg.
View these photos on Theatre in Pictures »

At the BAC, two of the five particpants were short-changed somewhat (if that’s possible in a free show) by being booted out of the proceedings with ten or fifteen minutes left to run; these two now get to return, which diminishes the shock value for the other three, but is much fairer and more inclusive. The scenario is just as weird, but tweaks near the climax have made it, if anything, even more sinister (in my dreams last night I heard a voice, struggling to be heard over a wash of static, warning me “he’s trying to take you over!”).

The full potential of audio-instruction in theatre has yet to be discovered, but GuruGuru’s discussion of determinism and free will (which chimes with chilling resonance when the players in the discussion are themselves deterministically controlled) will surely single it out as a defining early work of the genre.

Also “on the headphones” at this year’s Fringe is David Leddy, who is fast becoming a big name in the Scottish theatre scene. Susurrus sends individuals out into the Royal Botanic Gardens, equipped with mp3 players and headphones à la Wondermart, but is emphatically not audio-instructed theatre. Rather than transforming members of the public into performers, Leddy’s headphones simply insulate them from the outside world and wrap them instead in the drama of Susurrus itself.

The audio element wouldn’t be out of place in Radio 4’s Afternoon Play: inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and puncutated by excerpts from Benjamin Britten’s libretto of that play, it consists of several interwoven monologues that gradually reveal a family drama that spans two generations. What makes Susurrus theatre, rather than radio drama, is that Leddy has nominated a setting (the Botanics ) and a route to take around it; each of the eight scenes is associated with a location on the accompanying map.

Though the Botanics feature prominently in the plot, the audio can feel disconnected from the surroundings – largely, I think, because you’re instructed to remain in one location during the monologues, and the action stalls while you move from place to place, so the narrative segments feel like interludes in your own personal journey, rather than inextricably linked to it. Susurrus is another example of the headphone theatre genre’s potential, but only in a purely technical sense; the story it tells is separate from the apparatus used to tell it, while in Rotozaza’s work, the two are one.

Coming up in Episode Two: Belt Up / Parents’ Evening

On the one hand, that’s the advantage of a year’s experience: unlike last year, the Fringe isn’t a totally unfamiliar land, and I have known landmarks of quality I can use to navigate. On the other hand, the landscape is one of shifting sands, and it’s difficult to get sucked into exciting new worlds and experiences without occasionally leaving the familiar, solid ground behind.

So here’s the plan for Fringe ‘09: for every show or company I revisit from last year, I’ll seek out something else that’s similar in style or content but otherwise totally unfamiliar, then compare them side by side and see how the shock of the new compares to the security of the old.

Coming up in Episode One: Rotozaza at the Forest Fringe / David Leddy’s Susurrus

And ‘shift’ us is what Edgar Oliver does best. From the moment he steps on stage, he draws us in to this sinister tale of gothic proportions, albeit mellowed by his seductive New York camp drawl. In the crumbling house where Oliver lived for thirty years, his one-man show brings to life an array of eccentric characters all verging on the grotesque. The ‘cast’ includes a retired postman who mixes his vodka with milk, the ‘man upstairs’ who never visits the bathroom and defecates in suitcases and ‘the Lady Macbeth of rags’, obsessed with laundry and who carries soap bars in an enamel washbasin.

Oliver’s narrative is exquisitely voyeuristic with its quest for a repellent intimacy with his grotesque characters. Don’t be fooled by the first ‘scene’ and its humorous puns; there is no laughter to be had at the expense of the characters, the laughter is all at our expense. For as soon as we settle comfortably in the play’s rhythm, Oliver tears us mercilessly away: he becomes madly infatuated with a young actor. We stop laughing. Now we can relate. Now we wish we didn’t. Now we want to, now we don’t.

Oliver turns over in his bed to touch his lover’s shoulder, and the shoulder, the whole arm, comes loose and crumbles. His lover’s body disintegrates. It’s a dream, no it isn’t. Loneliness does that to you, Oliver seems to say. That nonchalant youth sleeping soundly, unaware of the crumbling of flesh to come, of the life to be had, of this journey.

Oliver’s play succeeds in chilling us to the bone by the evocation of loneliness in this bizarre place. This is no ‘Yacoubian Building‘ tale relocated to Greenwich Village. East 10th Street haunts the playwright and the audience alike. It’s that internal ‘haunted’ house, where humanity wrestles with the profound peculiarities of a meaningless existence that, now and then, goes wayward and crumbles.