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.

When Jack Pratchard is killed in his village, he has to travel across the ocean to the City of the Dead where the first person who ever died rules as Queen. She is searching for her husband in every dead soul that enters her grand palace. Meanwhile, on the shores of the living, a curious old man claims to have a secret under his hat. A great theatrical spectacle is underway, and jack Pratchard arrives there just in time to discover why the sea has been filling up with dead souls.

Storey’s narration is imbued with a surrealist sense of humour and delivered with heavy tone of voice; it’s clear that he enjoys his characters while still being able to keep a degree of narrative distance. He weaves in a number of literary references that bring an archaic quality to the construction of the tale, including a nod to the Greek myth of Charon, the boatman who guards the gates of the underworld and the space between the dead and the living; and Jack Pratchard’s reaction to his own death is reminiscent of Gogol’s satirical and fate-bound character Kovalylov in The Nose, both characters stand detached from and in awe of their predicaments.

The finely illustrated backdrops and characters give the piece a timeless, magical atmosphere. Moments of dramatic tension are marked by breaks from the stage frame. The living husband dances around the town square and out into the space of the theatre, laughing and giggling to conceal the secret behind his hat, guided by the narrator’s hands.

Dark magic and comedic allure aside, the narrative thread unravels in places. When images slide in and out of our field of vision, they do so with elegance but not always with intent. The beauty of the illustrations all too often fades into the wooden easel; they are at their most convincing when used outside the boundaries of the stage, not bogged down by technicalities or logistics.

Overall, Jack Pratchard is a brilliant feat of storytelling, with a timeless feel and an imaginative use of theatrical medium. Storey’s dedication to the story is impressive and the show falters only on the few occasions when it breaks with its own logic or over-confines itself to unnecessary boundaries.

The report concerns the 1993 military coup in Burundi. The Central African country’s first Hutu president, Melchior Ndadaye, was democratically elected and subsequently assassinated, initiating a civil war between Hutu and Tutsi peoples. As the play’s sources testify, no one is sure where responsibility for the assassination lies. Military officers blame mutinous troops, but none of these mutineers were ever interviewed by the U.N., and Jean-Paul Kamana, fingered as the man behind the curtain, is considered a mere scapegoat.

It’s ripe material for a verbatim play. The situation in Burundi is not common knowledge in the U.K., and at its best the format is perfectly suited to peeling away layers of deceit and misdirection such as seem to be at work here. Sadly, I left no wiser about Burundi than when I arrived.

The punctuation and paragraph codes of the report are all verbalised, emphasising the obscuring power of U.N. Officialese a little too well and rendering most of the main source material near incomprehensible. Promisingly, material from blogs and personal interviews ‘translates’ the first few sections into a more easily relatable form; but the company seem not to trust this format to hold the audience’s attention for more than twenty minutes.

The production is riddled with business designed to overcome the inherent problem with the verbatim form. The audience sits with the cast around a huge wooden table, as if we are U.N. delegates being briefed on the situation. This works. After twenty minutes the cast start playing musical chairs, and after half an hour the gimmicky little physical setpieces begin.

In one corner a woman wrangles and tangles herself with the cords of two phones. Later, a fish is gutted and beheaded on a block. Removable panels of the tabletop reveal pockets of soil full of buried mobile phones. A lot of it seems to mean something, but there’s no cohesion: the sense is that director Paul Burgess is just throwing out image after image in the hope that the audience will decode their own meaning from it all. By the end of the play, so much is happening at once that it’s hard to concentrate on the verbal testimony, and impossible to follow the slideshow of helpful contextual material.

A Place at the Table has a couple of rock-solid concepts – the subject matter and staging – at its heart, but glommed around them is a mass of shiny little distractions that serve only to obscure the truths verbatim theatre is supposed to expose. It turns out it’s possible to make verbatim theatre that isn’t static enough – who knew?

Chi Chi Bunichi is a devised ensemble performance exploring the resonant qualities of Ladino, a dying language once widely spoken throughout the Balkans, but now surviving only in songs. These songs provide the backbone of a show which explores memory, the carrying of children and ghosts, lost communities, the creation of new relationships, and the re-enactment of tragedy, if not as farce, then as gently wistful comedy. Borders are crossed, some goodbyes are forever, and old rituals get remade in new places. The company of five sing, dance, tell stories, joke and serve tea with understated, whimsical skill. The audience is drawn into an intimate, friendly, laid-back gathering where nothing is ever explained, but much is suggested, through combinations of music and gesture and telling, teasing interactions.

The songs, some ancient and some modern, are beautifully, simply arranged for a variety of odd-looking instruments. Melancholy and earthy, they root themselves in your brain regardless of linguistic difference, undermining the walls between memories real and imagined, other people’s pasts and your own. The audience, squeezed together on benches, aren’t forced into accepting any particular story, but left to discover their own relationship with the material, and with each other. The result was an uncommonly good humoured shared experience, with much meeting of eyes, smiling at strangers, passing of sweeties and the odd moment of quiet euphoria.

And the mother? Well, she was glad of her cup of tea, didn’t want to get her trousers dirty helping to pick up potatoes, but by the end was relaxed enough to be coaxed onstage, to let a performer expire in her arms. “Better than last night” was her eventual verdict. Now, as “last night” was an over-priced, over-produced West-End money-spinner, whose producers would undoubtedly sue, I shall say no more. Except that Chi Chi Bunichi is something just a little bit out of the ordinary. And anyone who crosses their path would be well advised to take a seat, take some tea, and let themselves be taken on a journey.

The chorus have been grazing on Beckett and Sophocles. Ruminantly, feverishly, raptly and wide-eyed they engage in rituals of pollution, cleansing and expiation. There’s birthing, and breeding, and inexplicable infection, and a herd bound together by solitary terror. Hip-swaying and intent, they spin what might be sought-for answers, and might be whole new questions out of their sinuous, spasming bodies.

Some of the symbolic threads are strung pretty tight, even to the point of having snapped. The man with the limp might be the farmer and might be Oedipus, but neither his herds nor his chorus seem to recognise his gait. At times the text(s) and the physical score feel like unfamiliar dance partners, awkwardly uncertain who’s leading. They tread on each other’s toes, bump foreheads and occasionally jerk the atmospheric rhythms of the show off-balance. But despite clumsy moments, the effect of the whole is oddly, hypnotically beautiful.

This is densely imagined and experienced dance-drama, evocative and tantalising and paradoxically satisfying. Perhaps the only Oedipus who matters is the one behind our eyes, challenged to find a personal meaning in this riddling ritual. The Cows Come Home is an enigmatic experience that resonates in some place deeper and stranger than the intellect, transcending narrative obscurity to achieve a beguiling synthesis of music and image and motion.