The play’s focus is split between a thematic tour of an imagined Borges and the daily travails of young members in a present-day book club. The Argentine author is brought to life through a series of visual metaphors, frantically intercut with stark, film-like transitions. Among the vignettes are a wonderful torch and coat-made tiger, a book-built aeroplane fit for a Little Prince, and in one of several nods to Complicite, a flight of paper birds. David Luke steps in and out of slow-motion movement pieces as a silent, foreboding Borges, meeting the audience head-on, while audio excerpts from key works add a secondary, philosophical layer to this bioplay.

The recurrent book club scenes, with their comedic and vernacular tone, are staged in a brightly lit semicircle that purposely disrupts the play’s poetic flow. It allows the group to tackle the Borgesian thematic from the point of view of the club members. Thus, Nick (Nick Pitt) falls in love with Sophie (Sophie Cullen) who soon after begins to lose her sight, placing a well-delivered, sombre slant on the hitherto unquestioned act and meaning of reading. Meanwhile Kate (Kate Stanley) is busy preparing for a life-changing job at the prestigious Bodleian library and uses the group as a sounding board for her trepidations.

The company’s strength is without doubt its tightly coordinated manipulation of space. The ability to transform a tiny, empty square into a detailed, textured and low-tech landscape of the imaginary, bodes well for future work with greater resources. Ambition and ideas are clearly not in short supply here. Where the production suffers is in its dealings with the literary legacy of Borges, which to me is of greater excitement and complexity than the well-noted biographical ‘truths’. This abundance of fertile, provocative writings, many of which have found new resonance in the Internet age, take an unsatisfying background stance in Borges and I.

‘The library’, writes Borges, ‘exists ab aeterno’ and defines ‘the future eternity of the world’. Eternity in an hour is asking the impossible, but a riskier, more intrepid journey into the matrix of a literary mind, his short stories for example, would certainly not go amiss. Watch out for Idle Motion Theatre this summer with their new show, The Vanishing Horizon.

The play never quite explains the link between Catholic emancipation and the travails of wayward Kitty, while Rafe Beckley’s production can’t seem to decide whether it wants to be a history play, a melodrama or a farce. Too much reliance upon broad comedy blurs the multiplying ironies of Crilly’s self-referential plotting. And there’s an awful lot of ranting and over-acting going on; neither polished enough to be convincingly satiric, nor sufficiently detailed for period reconstruction.

Amid much mugging, Peter Gerald gives a stand-out performance as broadside profiteer Ranseck, dapper, vulgar, gimlet-eyed and seductively plausible in his villainy. Amy Molloy’s Kitty is a frustrating and flightily self-willed ingénue, whose longing to seize centre-stage is eventually realised in the play’s pathetic final movement. And after a long, determined slog through sundry implausible situations, a warm understated humour suddenly illuminates the closing exchange between Ruairi Conaghan’s hardworking Ned and the unsentimental Julie of Charlotte McCurry.

With fewer histrionics, and greater faith in the actors’ ability to make us care, Kitty and Damnation would be a much stronger piece of theatre. It’s a play that tries to do far too much, with limited resources, and only limited success. Still there’s plenty to admire about the ambition of a young company committed to staging new drama that goes beyond the inside of someone’s flat. This desire for epic narratives, entangling the public and the personal, offers the promise of more interesting work to come.

Whether or not I suspect correctly, I don’t feel it would be fair to measure an unfinished piece of work with the same yardstick as an Olivier Theatre production. So listen up, Ten Pence Short! By the time I’m finished with you, you’ll only be Eight Pence Short, because I’m giving you my two pence. Boom tish.

Notes for Laura Cairns, playwright: you obviously have a strong grasp of the nuts and bolts of drama. You’ve got two characters who don’t get on, and a reason why they’re forced to endure one another’s company, creating conflict, which is the essence of drama. And a social networking site dedicated to burgling the recently deceased? I applaud your inventiveness, although I’m not sure you’ve really thought the idea through.

Other than that the play is a bit depthless. The characters reveal information about themselves, but neither one changes or learns anything. You raise potentially interesting moral questions without exploring them. The ticking clock is a tried and trusted method for generating tension, but you defuse it anticlimactically with a deus ex machina ending that excuses you and your characters from actually facing any of the moral challenges you set up. Lose the final phone call, or have it come too late.

Notes for Nick Bruckman, director: there’s enough comic material in the scenario and the lines that you probably don’t need to resort to silly physical business to get laughs. Also, there’s a scene in Hot Fuzz with an amdram production of Romeo and Juliet that ends in a bonkers song and dance number; compare and contrast the end of Hot Air.

Notes for Laura Cairns (Margot) and Alice Dooley (Elizabeth): Margot is highly strung and Elizabeth is excitable and a bit dim. For 40 minutes. Free Fringe audiences will walk out the moment their attention starts to drift.

A quote for your flyers: “Hot Air is unflinchingly daft.” With a bit of revision, you might be able to up that to “a darkly comic and surrealist ode to the detached and decaying morality of the internet age” – but you aren’t there yet.

Written in the form of letters from Werther to his friend Wilhelm, the novel recounts the tragic downfall of a young artist consumed by unrequited love and driven to suicide. Ján Mikuš fuses key elements of the novel’s narrative structure with mime, ‘freak show’ and extracts from the letters to explore the character of the young philosopher turned fool in love.

Mikuš switches between real and surreal characters with remarkable ease. One moment he is the director of the show, announcing, with a wry smile, that the actor is lost somewhere in London; that London is big, but the show must go on. He asks the audience to be tolerant of his lack of acting skills. ‘Be with me’, he says. ‘Super’. Then when he becomes the actor, he demonstrates a wonderfully precise and evocative physical language.

As well as inhabiting Werter’s character, caught in the love triangle that drives him to desperation, he also plays the fool – a man pretending to be someone else, lost in the chaos of his own imagination. All these characterizations are repeated throughout the performance, each time a little different, taking them deeper into unknown territory.

What makes Werter, Werter so compelling is its ability to play with structure, illusion and anticipation – the basis of theatre. Thus, in the final quarter of the performance we observe Werter repeatedly committing suicide. From tragic act it becomes spectacle. The sounds of gun shots turn into machineguns. We see Werter run across the stage, repeatedly being murdered in front of a projection of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, whom he eventually shoots with his red toy gun, writing the words ‘Are you really with me?’ in front of the painting. Werter kills fate and love, yet Mikuš brings them back through the magic of repetition.

Reminiscent of Jan Švankmajer’s short animated films exploring the mechanisms of macabre spectacle, the performance toys with the meaning of theatrical tradition and the possibilities of play. There is a strong dialogue between the romanticism that Mikuš holds in such irony, and the spectacle he so skilfully drifts into. Theatre does not have to be linear or orderly, its strength lies in collage, Mikuš tells us. Werter, Werter is broken, odd, and wonderful.

In audio-instructed productions, unrehearsed members of the public are given headphones that deliver prerecorded directions, making them at once audience and performer. Gathering multiple examples of this relatively new art form together under one banner allows its practitioners to prove that it isn’t just a one-trick gimmick; the technique can be applied to a variety of different styles and situations, and can have a variety of different outcomes for the participants.

For instance, while Rotozaza’s Wondermart tries hard to make participants feel safe, Rotating in a Room of Images does the opposite. Participants spend the majority of the 15-minute production in pitch darkness, guided only by invisible hands and the spooky voice in the headphones. The overwhelming feeling is of powerlessness. On your own, you’re incapable even of escaping the darkened space, much less of finding “the Room” to which the voice continually refers. You’re forced instead to rely on the goodwill of expressionless figures glimpsed moving in slow motion during brief periods of visibility – and on the disembodied voice in your head.

The actual content of Rotating in a Room of Images is everything critics of fringe theatre accuse fringe theatre of being – oblique, opaque, and so open to interpretation that it may as well mean nothing at all – but it’ll still leave you emotionally shaken. Whatever that says about this specific audio-instructed production, it’s evidence that the technique in general possesses the power not only to amuse, but also to shock. It’s difficult to decide whether to classify productions like this as theatre, but that breadth of potential should be an incentive to get them under theatre’s umbrella before some other medium claims them as its own.

The Forest Fringe – a studio space in an abandoned church, supported by Battersea Arts Centre – was a popular venue at the Fringe 2008. The Forest Fringe at the BAC weekend (27-28 March) showcased some of the best work from last year and previewed some exciting work in progress planned for 2009.

2008 highlights included Tip of Your Tongue, director Abigail Conway’s PostSecret -style anonymous truth-telling ritual, in which participants read and then eat unspoken truths written by others on rice-paper; and Lucy Ellinson’s Eulogy, In State. Ellinson’s piece, staged in a dusty corridor under the BAC’s main staircase, required the audience to help construct a eulogy for Ellinson before holding a vigil over her ‘dead’ body.

Looking ahead to this coming August, Bootworks had taken over a corner of the foyer with their Black Box, a short performance installation intended for a single audience member. In fact – probably intentionally – Black Box proved as entertaining for those outside the box as for the lone observer seated inside. While the silent-movie narrative could only be decoded from inside, only from outside was it possible to appreciate the company’s feats of timing and physical illusion.

In the Committee Room, Tinned Fingers created a cosy, playful world of animal stories, adapted drama games and arbitrary popularity-contest morality, in Our Father’s Ears. An ample supply of wine and the friendly atmosphere ensured the audience were happy to take part.

For just 15 lucky participants per night, Rotozaza were testing out their new ‘autoteatro’ experience, GuruGuru. Autoteatro blurs, erases and redraws the line between audience and performer by feeding prerecorded lines and instructions to participants via headphones, creating a prepackaged performance that changes with every iteration while requiring no regular actors. It’s a form of theatre that would be impossible to conceive without modern technology.

The Festival Fringe is a space for experimentation. Fringe audiences not only accept, but expect deviation from convention. From the looks of its 2009 line-up so far, the Forest Fringe is set to challenge every convention in sight, from the role of the audience right up to what we can comfortably classify as theatre.

‘I’m frightened by the devil but I’m drawn to those who ain’t afraid’ (Joni Mitchell, A case of you.)

I went to the theatre last night and after the first act I cried. I wasn’t supposed to be crying. It was comedy.

I am permanently on the lookout for women on the comedy circuit and I rarely find them so when I do it’s always a great treat. Last night was particularly hopeful because I went to see a comedy sketch show that was dominated by women. Out of the 8 acts that were on, 7 of them were women. ‘Fantastic’ I thought to myself – ‘This is where all the women in comedy have been hiding and I get to see them all in one sitting’

Unfortunately what I sat through was so bad it made me cry. I couldn’t believe that for 50 minutes I didn’t laugh once. I didn’t even crack a smile. Ladies what are you doing to me? I am rapidly losing faith in this business of comedy that I love so much because as an audience member I’m not seeing anything that’s inspiring me and as a writer I can’t think of anything funny to write. I have severe writer’s block.

I am currently part of a comedy double act (male and female) that I do all the writing for and I enjoy very much. I never tire of writing characters for my partner, Reedy, and myself. It comes naturally to me as I love looking at the relationship between a man and a woman and exploring the different angles, emotions, situations I can throw at them. My next adventure, however, is to go solo. To stand on stage alone, in front of an audience I don’t know and make them laugh…actually at this moment in time just to see them smile would do. But I am struggling with my subject matter. I like to write characters and situations that appeal to both men and women. Unisex topics. With a female character on her own though, I am finding it difficult as I don’t have a male character to bounce off, to spar with, to tone down the oestrogen levels! Last night we were bombarded with jokes about periods, dating, babies, make – up. Other issues that regularly pop up with female comics (not all but most) are marriage, reaching 30, men, gaining weight, sex, men, keeping fit, getting dumped, men… COME ON GIRLS! Surely this can’t be all we have to talk about? As assertive, funny women, who are taking their careers in their hands, there must be something else that occupies our minds? As a 29 year old, single woman, yes, these are all issues that affect my life – they are worrying, inevitable and downright annoying. However, when I go to the theatre for entertainment and escapism I do not wish to be faced with them again.

Am I alone in my thinking? Do women want to hear about these subjects because they can relate to them? Do men really find it funny to hear about our failures in the dating game? Or am I just making excuses and stalling so that I can prolong the agony of standing on stage on my own? Perhaps I am continually searching for these women in comedy because, like Joni Mitchell says ‘I’m frightened by the devil, but I’m drawn to those who ain’t afraid’

I’ll never know really until I try. Until I have performed that first gig in front of an unfamiliar audience and truly found out whether, what I think is funny, works. On an all too regular basis I moan to a friend of mine about the quality of female comics (actually I moan about comedy in general) on the circuit and how I could do much better. His response back is always the same, worded slightly differently each time, but none the less he tells me that they’re the ones out there doing it, putting themselves up to be judged and criticised so until I pluck up the courage to actually do it myself, I should respect them for trying.

Well, I am trying to respect them for trying but I’m finding it extremely trying myself. There’s only so much unfunny comedy I can take! So this is a plea to all you ladies out there who are writing their own material and performing it on stage. Show me something different. Please. Let’s see some new ideas. Steer clear from the clichéd notion that all women talk about is men, menstruating and marriage (even if we do!) and let’s wow the audience with exciting and innovative female characters.

I have included myself in that plea and I promise I shall be bursting onto a stage near you very soon with a character that will hopefully have you rolling in the aisles and will have nothing to do with babies, boobs or boys!

We were supposed to have 6 and a half hours for our get in. ‘Well, that’s great’ I thought to myself. We can get used to the space, do a cue-to-cue run, practice our dance and have a full technical run through. Perfect. Lights up at 7.30pm and we’d be well and truly ready.

‘I’m sorry, there’s been a mix up and your get in is at 5.30pm’ the Theatre told us.

5.30PM! What? How can that be…What about the….FIVE THIRTY? That gave us two hours – Just two hours to cram everything in and come up smelling of roses at 7.30pm. And we did. Well…it was more fear mixed with a bit of sweat than roses, but we got the job done because we had to. You work with what you’re given in Fringe Theatre and that’s what I love about it. You don’t have the luxury of big, impressive sets or fancy lighting to hide behind. Stages are often tiny and you almost end up sitting on the audience’s lap in most venues; but this is where I thrive because after all the ‘decoration’ is taken away, what remains is the essence of the work. Up, close and personal. What you’ve written, directed or what you’re performing has to make up for this lack of support.

The theatre company that I co-founded produces regular work on the London Fringe. I am not able to pay my actors (they do it, like me, for the love of it), I have no money to buy lots or props or to construct an elaborate set and I have to rely on favours from friends for the technical side of things. Therefore my work has to stand out as being the most impressive part of the production and this is why, I believe, you find some of the most original, entertaining and experimental theatre of today on the London Fringe.

My most recent show, me and him, currently on at the Hen and Chickens Theatre in Islington, was performed to an audience of just 8. Eight expectant faces and I knew every single of them. Granted, this is not a huge problem, but considering my two-person sketch show is a comedy, obviously the more laughs we get the better. I don’t think I’ve ever had to work harder. Absolute concentration was paramount because all that was going through my head was:

‘Oh my sister’s over there…and I can see Tim…Why is no one laughing? How much money will I owe the theatre? There’s Sue at the back etc.’

But once I’d got over the initial shock of feeling like I was doing a skit in my living room for 8 of my friends, I threw myself wholeheartedly into this 52 minute piece of work that Reedy and I find hilarious and have a lot of faith in. Nevertheless, 8 people is actually quite a good audience compared to what we first started out with, 6 years ago. Reedy and I were part of another company, Tigco, that at the moment is playing to packed houses with their comedy series, Tuesdays, at another London Fringe venue – Lowdown at the Albany.

Wasn’t always the case though.

We once did a show to one-person….and she was the girlfriend of one of the cast members! Funny looking back now but at the time it was heartbreaking for us naive, young dreamers who thought that because we’d put so much time and effort and energy into it surely we’d sell out. We think it’s amazing so everyone else will…right?

However, all was not lost and I did come away with something that night. Adam Riches, Founder of Tigco, taught me that it doesn’t matter how much money you lose, how many people were in your audience or how small you may feel, as long as you learn something from the experience and you apply it to your next production then you haven’t lost out on anything. In fact you’ve gained something because what you learn creatively will be far more rewarding than making a profit or having a full house. If you’re out there doing it, trying, then that’s half the battle. Like someone said to me recently

‘You are in the 2% minority of this world that are doing what they truly want and that in itself is success’

I feel very lucky to be part of that 2%.

So what I’m trying to say is come and support the little people; those of us at the margins who are trying to live our dreams. Dare to venture out into the dodgy little fringe theatres, the rooms above pubs that are dotted all around London. Performances may not be extremely slick or hi-tech. You may never have heard of the company you’re watching. You may be crammed into a tiny, sweaty theatre that forgets to tell you to turn your mobile phone off, where the air conditioning is so loud that you sporadically miss a minute’s worth of dialogue, but like I said before you will be watching some of the most original, entertaining and experimental theatre of today – out there on the London Fringe.