The major problem with asking the audience to act as jury is that they know it isn’t real. However engaging the production is, however well immersed they become into its world, they still know no one is really going to die as a result of their vote, and so the whole exercise becomes a purely academic one.

Full Tilt address this issue by showing the audience the consequences of their decision in a brief but emotive coda. And while the point still stands that said consequences aren’t real, and no one in the audience is going to endure a lifetime of guilt over them, the vote and the coda act as a live demonstration of themes that are repeated and reinforced throughout the production.

Orestes believed he was carrying out justice when he killed his mother the Queen, but he failed to foresee the injustice his actions would heap upon her subjects. The women believe they are carrying out justice by punishing Orestes for his crime, but they turn to kidnapping and other acts of terror in order to do so. And finally, the audience declares what the majority believe to be just, and is in turn brought face to face with the injustice that decision brings about.

It isn’t an easy decision, either; Full Tilt layer the apparently black-and-white issue of matricide with class and gender issues, so that far from simply passing judgement on Orestes, the audience must also pick sides in much weightier debates. Both sides constantly spout self-righteous dogma, either with victimised vitriol or phony PR smiles, so it’s difficult if not impossible to develop sympathy towards either party’s plight. They also hammer home their arguments with a degree of repetition that reinforces the issues only up to a point, after which its rhetorical value is exhausted and it begins to feel like Chinese water torture.

Of course the audience still won’t put in as much thought as they would if lives really were on the line, but Full Tilt ensure that the issues are sufficiently complex that even making an arbitrary decision requires a modicum of reflection – which forces each audience member to define, in whatever small way, their own idea of justice. While you won’t leave wracked with guilt, you may leave knowing yourself a little better.

Sam Wilkin’s eponymous rover is an engaging, boyish rake, perpetually half-sozzled, and with the morals of a sewer rat. As Florinda, Rebecca Shanks survives a great deal of attempted ravishment with self-possession, and without recourse to the waterworks. Adura Onashile balances poise with passion as an unexpectedly susceptible courtesan. And Blunt, the hapless butt of an extravagant gulling, is played with impressive restraint and a wealth of compassionate detail by an appealingly modest Jonathan Warde.

In the cavernous spaces of the Southwark Playhouse the young cast do well to sustain their diction and clarity. A few lines get lost in the more chaotic melees and scene-shifts, but the swordplay, music and dancing sweep with boisterous energy through the show’s various playing-spaces. The promenade aspects of the production sometimes feel contrived, but pay dividends in the acquisition of a real bar and balcony. And as the actors dash about, Mika Handley’s glamorous costumes glisten seductively through torchlit gloom.

Behn’s impossibly neat happy ending is a triumph of blithe forgetfulness on the part of most of the play’s protagonists. Still, the prevailing mood of ‘what happens at the carnival …’ feels a bit of a cop-out given the seriousness of some of the sins being muffled by wedding bells. Ebulliently broad-minded, Jones’ production tends to skip over the deepening shadows that dog its heroes’ heels. But despite this unsettling oversight, The Rover remains a stylish, pacey and bawdily pleasurable entertainment.

The Moon The Moon explores, with escalating surrealism, the blurred relationship between perception and reality. His memory and identity fractured by grief, the Man must choose between his human rescuers’ kill-or-cure approach and the unfathomable alternative offered by his supernatural suitor, the Moon (Helen Cassidy).

The Moon represents the Man’s memory of his wife, a dour but sentimental Scot, whom he must rediscover and petition for forgiveness before his keepers will be satisfied that he’s ready to leave the safety of his prison. Cassidy’s performance is restrained, and consequently cannot save the odd over-prolonged scene, such as when the couple read aloud from one another’s diaries, from becoming static and dull.

The Moon, a redheaded deity with a dirty mind and a knowing, mischievous kink in her cheek, makes no secret of the fact that she desires the Man romantically, whereas the mortal couple feel a more clinical responsibility to fix what’s broken inside him. Yet while they advocate rose-tinting and distorting his past as a route to recovery, she encourages him to acknowledge and own his grief rather than amputate it. Cassidy proves herself a versatile and confident character actor, successfully conveying the fickle and unknowable, yet flawed and human aspects of a being that wouldn’t look out of place in the ancient Greek pantheon.

Rhys Jarman’s set – a stark, bare stone basement – is full of nifty concealed compartments containing cupboards and windows.

Rhys Jarman’s set is walled with dozens of doors which allow the various competing forces in to influence the Man, but none of which can be opened from his side. The only way for him to reach back towards any of them is through Jarman’s giant moon – part window, part spotlight, given a cool luminescence by lighting designer Ben Pacey.

At its best, art invites multiple valid interpretations without becoming so diffuse as to sacrifice the clarity of the creators’ intentions.

The Moon The Moon is many overlapping things, but never feels like collage. Its elements complement rather than contradict one another, allowing interpretations from the supernatural to the naturalistic to coexist without ever suggesting that Unlimited Theatre are in anything less than complete control.

The Playhouse have tapped into their venue’s natural mystique for their latest initiative, Southwark Playhouse Secrets. Actually, not much about the programme is secret – it’s timetabled in full on the website, and if you sign up to the Facebook group you’ll receive regular invitations to upcoming events. But couple the name with the location and you can believe you’ve discovered an exclusive theatrical underground – an irresistible and addictive feeling.

The Secrets themselves are short theatrical happenings that occur in and around the Playhouse at lunchtimes, in the evenings and late at night (allowing you to catch some bite-sized theatre in your lunch break, after work or following a couple of drinks at one of the nearby Tooley Street pubs). The Playhouse’s main theatre space is off-limits, so Secrets take place in the bar, storerooms or even the toilets. Admissions for some Secrets are limited for this reason, so book ahead.

Because anyone can apply to the Secrets curators (soon to be joined by London Theatre Blog’s own Jens Peters) for a slot, and because the programme is intended to keep rolling indefinitely, the work featured is diverse and often eccentric. There’s music, comedy, dance, improvisation, work in progress and more.

Take Scratch Interact. While a man in his vest and boxers wanders around the bar taking a mute interest in empty beer bottles and offering people half-sucked Werther’s Originals scored from Blanche Marvin, we’re encouraged to sign up for “intimate” interactive performances in the toilets.

In one toilet is a woman surrounded by objects: tickets stubs, a cigarette lighter. You enter alone, with no other audience members to hide behind. It turns out you’re breaking up with her; the objects are the debris of your relationship. The stub from your first movie date. Your lighter, from before you gave up.

You get one companion for the other toilet, but you’re shepherded into separate cubicles and then the lights go out. In the dark, people whisper to you both. One pleads for reassurance that everything will be all right. The other points out you have no idea who he is. He could be a bad person. Who gets which voice is pure pot luck.

Intrigued, I venture back a week later for Home, a physical theatre piece by Tangled Feet. Behind the bar is a storecupboard door; after Scratch Interact I’m primed for a performance in a cupboard, but past all the props and costumes is another door leading to an arched vault twice as big as the Playhouse’s main theatre. It’s dark and chilly, there’s plaintive string music coming from somewhere, and the company’s torch beams only serve to accentuate the spooky vastness of the place.

What follows is by turns sinister, sweet, playful and almost spiritual. Eight performers, eight torches and eight rustly, plasticky one-man children’s easy-up tents make, lose, regain, break and mourn their homes in the vault through dance, silhouette play and the endearingly daft practice of rolling around the floor while still inside a tent.

Two Secrets can’t give a full picture of the programme, but they can begin to highlight some of the common threads tying the different pieces together. The most striking is the companies’ understanding of and enthusiastic engagement with the unconventional performance spaces on offer.

There’s also a strong sense of community building in the Playhouse bar. I ran into several of the same people on both my visits, a few of whom were future Secrets slot holders themselves. Community and word of mouth power the theatre industry, and the Southwark Playhouse Secrets seem to be effortlessly generating both. Long may they continue.

Having absolutely no background in dance and coming from a rather text-based approach, I found the first ten minutes of the show very dense. But the more I watched, the more I found the piece had a lot to offer. For example, music and movements soon develop a narrative quality that is ingeniously interwoven with and often set against the ancient texts form the basis of the spoken word. One aspect of Mary’s identity, her nature as sinner, is split off from the main character (Sandra Shirley) and manifested in three Shadows (Lola Maury, Wanda Caddick, Katharine Yates). Their main function is the expression of a mixture of sexiness, self-castigation, and pain.

This comes to dominate the evening’s physical narrative to such an extent that it threatens to become one-dimensional. Is there really no other interesting aspect in Mary Magdalene’s corporeality? By expressing the two conflicting views of her as virgin and whore, the company seems to fall into the same reductive trap as the very texts they set themselves against. Nonetheless, the choreography is convincing through the performers’ high level of skill, which produces images that are both intense and moving.

The music, mainly choral singing and accompaniment by a single guitar, is as powerful in its message as the dance, but often achieves a higher level of subtlety – probably because it can blend more easily with both word and movement. Mircha Mangiacotti conjures up tunes from his guitar that often were downright eerie. The breadth of his tonal possibilities is revealed to the full when he creates three wholly convincing bell-strokes (!) during the scene of Jesus’ betrayal.

This marks the evenings climax, both thematically and emotionally. Suddenly Jesus (Alexandre Achour) is left alone on the desolate stage. At this moment, he is wholly human: afraid, vulnerable, desperately running from one corner to the other. Then came one of these felicitous coincidences that spice up every special theatre evening: when Jesus is finally ready to confront his death, and walks slowly to his doom, we hear a train booming over our heads. It is as if Jesus’ destiny is hitting him with the inexorable force of a steam-engine. No escape. No way out. I could hear him whisper the most appropriate expression of this situation: “Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachtani” – My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?

It is these human dimensions that give this production a special strength. Mary Magdalene is never wholly good, nor Saint Peter (Vincent Jerome) wholly antagonistic. Instead, we see their self-doubt, which allows us to understand that for example Peter’s attacks of Mary are as much an escape from his own insecurity as they are a struggle for power. It is a pity that this balance is partly forsaken when the company dramatises the medieval treatments of Mary Magdalene. Amir Sardari’s rendering of the story from The Golden Legend in the character of Jacobus de Voragine lays it bare to ridicule. His voice, naïve on the surface, but with mocking irony trembling behind it, does not allow the audience to judge for itself what the story has to say. Until this point, the production provides ample space for audience ruminations and was free from such opinionated deliveries.

The Magdalene Mysteries ends in the power struggle that came to dictate the currently popular view of this female saint. A Church Father (Thomas Thoroe, wonderful in the deep-felt earnestness of his tendentious beliefs) encounters Mary Magdalene’s gospel, written in sand. Unable to accept it and its challenge of hierarchical religion, he has it eradicated. Instead, the sand is used to inscribe a cross on the ground – the sign of an institutional Christianity as developing from the time of Emperor Constantine onwards. The truths, the doubts, as well as the human characters will be lost in the mists of time. Hopefully unlike this production, which deserves a greater audience than it had on this day!