Hanna Berrigan’s production of Slowly for The Wrestling School is taut and intense, its drearness undercut with splashes of muted hilarity. Howard Barker’s four funereal madonnas, weeping and wrathful, debate with furious pedantry the manner and meaning of their self-inflicted extinction. But the terrible sophistication of their self-communing is threatened by the very acuteness of their discourse. What will happen if someone dare challenge the premise that pipes the measure for their determined dance of death?

Vanessa Ackerman, Suzy Cooper, Megan Hall and Penelope McGhie flesh out the drama’s bitter abstractions with painstaking care and unfathomable pity. White-faced and wary, their uniform weeds and sculptural formality makes meaningful the smallest physical deviation or twitch, their knotted fingers and wide open eyes silently screaming with tension.

Slowly broods mercilessly on the unseemly slippage between compassion and capitulation, the basest denominators of survival, and the emotional terrorism of willed victimhood. The play is unblinkingly cruel about the place of women in the world and in war (a woman can get by with just three words, one sister tutors another). And it scrupulously declines to judge between the variant duties and desires which consume the four women, briefly, unexpectedly shocked into painful liberty by the violent dissolution of every protocol they’ve ever known.

Short, sour and stinging, Slowly pits the seductive rituals of conformity against the risk and indignity of freedom. Impartially baleful, it makes no promises of happy endings for anyone. The only certainty is that the barbarians, infinitely slowly, continue their advance.

Howard Barker’s Found in the Ground is suffused with the furious lassitude which follows the discovery that rote piety is as poisonous a rote evil, that virtue and justice are polluted by the vulgar quotidian they purport to serve, and that neither the desecration nor the fetishisation of great wickedness is any substitute for the thing itself. Arbitrary wickedness is revealed as the only possible route to self-assertion in a world that has degraded all the existing atrocities into tourist attractions, philosophy, or (worse) art. And then Hitler arrives, placidly extolling the virtues and pleasures of long rural rambles.

This production has all the hallmarks of Barker directing Barker: darkness, declamatoriness, unnecessary female nudity and uncompromising cruelty exercised to the point of self-indulgence. The acting company are surreptitiously wonderful, like naughty children scribbling cartoons in the margins of their algebra. The pace is unremittingly funereal.

I personally suspect that Found in the Ground might be more rewarding to read than to watch. Also that it might be more rewarding to watch if directed by someone other than its author. Barker’s comprehensive contempt for spectators whose jejune theatrical tastes run to more than bare breasts and black curtains is conspicuous. A yellow dressing gown glows with rare opulence amid the gloom, while all those burning books emit no more than a wan, sickly seepage of paler darkness.

This is a style of presentation that Barker enthusiasts will recognise, and some will undoubtedly relish. But Found in the Ground isn’t calculated to accommodate the Barker novice, or anyone with a low-ish boredom threshold. So you’ve been warned.

The First World War setting of Jack Shepherd’s naturalistic production makes it all seem frighteningly possible. In a dingy field hospital, shell-shocked and dying soldiers, and the women wearily tending them, provide the appalled, grieving and feverishly delusional voice of the tragic chorus. Instinctive regimental loyalties replace self-preservation and logic in the minds of traumatised Tommies. And their underscore of tuneless whistling and mirthless laughter suffuses the drama with the mutedly gut-wrenching music of men past hope.

A slow start and a subdued first movement are ratcheted up into something like a political thriller centering upon Toby Wharton’s Teucer, a public schoolboy in khaki, desperately clinging to untenable moral absolutes amid ethical and emotional carnage. He receives first rate support from the character actors in the company, with John Giles as a repulsively pompous Menelaus, and Dan Mullane as Agamemnon, scarred, scared, vindictive and possessed of a laugh like a death rattle.

Matthew Sim’s Odysseus wanders and watches, lighting his roll-ups with tell-tale shaking hands, exhausted beyond vengeance or triumphalism. As his divine confidante Athena, Jody Watson offers damage-limitation rather than salvation, appearing ex machina in a blood-stained nurse’s uniform. And Iarla McGowan makes a convincingly shattered hero of the suicidal Ajax: his detailed and understated performance reveals the charismatic and loved leader, the careful professional soldier, as well as the embittered victim of fate.

Ajax is playing in repertory with Macbeth and A Skull in Connemara, and the company have the attentiveness, authority and gravitas of a proper acting ensemble. In their grimy, bloodied hands, Sophocles’ drama acquires an unpretentious, slightly battered and totally compelling integrity.

In the front room of a small seaside house, three sisters relive some of the higher points in lives of quiet desperation. Sexual fantasy, crushed passion and unrequited sisterly love unfurl from memories of the New Electric Ballroom and centre on local rock ‘legend’ and teenage heartthrob, ‘the Roller Royle’.

There’s a ritualistic sense to the proceedings as the sisters, Clara and Breda (both in their 60’s) take turns at dressing up in miniskirts and skimpish tops to reenact their past. These transformations are punctuated by the intrusion of local fishmonger Patsy (Mikel Murfi) – epitome of the dull raconteur yet lovable for his pathetic attempts at wooing younger sibling Ada (Catherine Walsh).

This theatre within a theatre, purposely sparse and frustratingly static, stays afloat thanks to Walsh’s blisteringly beautiful text and the cast’s convincing delivery. Insistent repetitions, fraught silences and gritty monologues inject a sense of the absurd into this play and both confirm and condemn the central theme – recalled here by Breda:

“People talking just for the act of it. Words spinning to nothing. For no definable reason. Like a little puppy, a hungry puppy yapping for his supper, yap-yap-yap-yap…that’s people with words.”

Self-referential and self-denunciatory, this condemnation of colloquial exuberance keeps all lurking Father Ted-type clichés in check. With its absurdist overtones and Beckettian rhythm, The New Electric Ballroom is far from an outlandish portrayal of small port-town Irish life, it’s an indictment of cream cakes, silk suits, chit-chat and veneer, and an ode to human pathos, nostalgia and memory.

When I think of the word ‘picture’ I see old paintings in a front room, wooden frames and glass casing. Each picture tells a story through a composition of strokes: a boat at sea in heavy weather, an ambler passing by a rusty barn etc, there is a sense of stasis, a frozen world in ‘tableau’ form. I also think of photographs, a more mechanical medium that produces similar effects. Pictures never change, the subjects never move, but upon each viewing the eye may pick out a different detail, determine a different outcome to the story. Elements of mood, light, and time of day alter the viewer’s perception. Forced Entertainment’s The World in Pictures is a living picture gallery, a loud, playful and visual history of human evolution set across multiple frames; framed by the performance space at Riverside Studios, by the notion of time in performance, by the physical elements of set, costume and body for example. Objects on a tv screen, words spoken through microphones, painted in the air, choreographed and danced.

This juxtapositon of framing devices was an affont on common notions of perception. The very idea of distilling thousands of years of human evolution into a two hour performance is itself a critique of the writing and presentation of history. Historical discourses settle all too often for approximation over complex detail, meaning that misrepresentation and revisionism in history books is rife. Forced Entertainment brings the lunacy of history into focus and asks us to pay attention to how stories are framed.

In this sense the play opens with an ‘exercise’ – a case in point that becomes a leitmotiv for the rest of the piece. A lone character called Gerry walks on stage and tells the audience a story. Using words and imagination, he addresses the audience directly, intimately, incites us to translate his words into pictures in our minds so that we become the owners of (his)story. We were invited to imagine ourselves on the edge of a high-rise building looking down at the street below. We were asked to remember what happened on our way to the theatre, the places we passed through, the people we saw in the tube.

This opening sequence hinges on the matter of perception, but it also provokes the audience into questioning the extent and reach of a theatre event. Where does the frame begin and end with the picture in theatre? Is it on stage? Does it carry over into life outisde the theatre as Gerry suggests?

In somewhat of a coincidence, on my way to the Riverside Studios that evening, I felt an impulse to write. I was sitting on a tube train between King’s Cross and Hammersmith and nothing much was happening, so I took out my notebook and began writing thoughts in a stream of consciousness fashion. I decided to include that stream of writing here verbatim as an illustration of extending the frame of theatre beyond the walls of the auditorium, beyond the set time of the play and to illustrate one person’s perception of the world:

Headphone drone, the white-boned groan of an average English clone in a westbound tube on a light, bright Saturday night. Nothing more to share than baffled, wrinkled stares, hacking and clawing away at beauty – now decayed – nothing but the hour, the potent ticking power of revolutions in time, Earth revolving, spinning, moaning. Was time invented in the mind?

Everything to look at, nothing of interest. In every nook and cranny, detritus and grime, the shadow is in the crime, sounds of cries, internal sighs, killing culture, mass-murder in fields of ether and the last vein of pain begins to wane and filters through the body’s drains, except your stare, your twitching eye, thick black mascara, button nose and pink lips, wry smile – you dare to stare at me and then with opened mouth, comes this riotous, raucous laughter.

The roar of nothing more, nothing more to abhor, above this arid earth I soar, eagle without claws, gliding over warm, swirling storms, released from earth pores, canyons of open musical score and rampant sprawling animal runs, tracks of feet, traps of meat, lines of speed, spirit, thrill, love. Love is the mind melting thoughts that pertain to all that violates its social name, shame, fame, defamed, maimed and reclaimed, onwards, onwards, this train is heading onwards for collision with the night.