Thespians Fred (Yaz Al-Shateer) and Eddie (Michael Grady-Hall) get caught in their own theatrical reconstruction. What starts off as comedy, complete with an in-house technician who marks his lighting cues with special dedication (Tom Crawshaw), turns out to be a drama revolving around missing friend Jen (Meriel Rosenkranz). Fred and Eddie’s dynamic duo transforms into a fractured friendship as the two delve deeper into their memories.

Tom Crawshaw’s play is based on a youthful, self-conscious but finely crafted text that explores the dynamics between actor, character and audience with brevity and an acute feel for language. Crawshaw’s theatrical construction is very aware of its own mechanics: a play within a play unfolds in front of us in which misunderstandings turn out to be plot twists and good old fashioned farce brings some charmingly tacky humour to the show.

And yet for all its theatrical complexity, the play doesn’t dig deep into its content, and bases its strength on clever word puns and conceits a little too often. The directing is patchy, lacking precision and allowing witty moments to slide by and important information to dissipate in the background. We travel through a pot-pourri of scenes wrapped in clever theatrics though seldom rising to the demands of the narrative.

Play on Words is an engaging show that attempts to deconstruct its own medium. It’s certainly rewarding to see a performance remove the ground from under its feet; and the cast works hard to meet the challenge, but the production cuts some important corners in the process.

The reason for this phenomenon lies in the play’s main theme. Its protagonist Jacob (Edmund Dehn) is suffering from Alzheimers, and the performance charts his decline. We witness the first stages of the illness when Jacob is still trying to hold on to his energetic life and his successful career as a head-hunter. Once this turns out to be impossible, he decides to capture his remaining memories on a tape-recorder. The play ends with his daughter Gracie (Rebecca Stevenson) and her ex-boyfriend Michael (Jim Fish) taking him on a tour of his own past based on his recorded memories. In the course of this development, Gracie manages to rekindle her relationship with her father, and also comes closer to Michael, the only person to help her through difficult times.

Cooper cleverly represents the collapse of past and present in Jacob’s mind through a fragmented chronology. With the use of two blackboards, on which the different moments in time are indicated, and the tape-recorder from which key memories are replayed, we see a poignant juxtaposition of these two time frames. Director Steve Harper enforces this mirroring effect by running many of these incidents in parallel. Harper is able to elude the duplication of storyline by exploring differences in tone and rhythm between the narration and the action: a memory that causes pain for Gracie and Michael for example, could have been a joyful experience for Jacob.

Through all of these changes of time and emotion, it is the actors’ versatility and subtlety that makes this performance special. Story and structure are well-conceived, but without Rebecca Stevenson’s ability to change from schoolgirl Gracie to a prematurely grown-up woman in a heartbeat, and Edmund Dehn’s harrowing juxtaposition of energetic businessman and a dumb, pitiable wreck of a man, the play would remain just that – an interesting story well told. Harper rightly identified Cooper’s ability to create nuanced characters as the strongest point of For Once I Was, and found actors that live up to the demands. Even characters that could have been seen as minor, such as Jacob’s girlfriend Eleanor, or Gracie’s ex-boyfriend Michael, are given depth by Victoria Kruger and Jim Fish. Strong as the main pull of empathy towards Jacob and his plight is, I never stopped thinking about the feelings of the people around him.

Consequently, plot was secondary, while relationships and reactions took centre-stage – a simple smile, the turning away of a face. I was surprised to see Annabel Pemberton’s Laura (Jacob’s wife) in the spotlight given her relatively small part. She infused every gesture with a special significance, but due to the intimacy of the play this came across as rather heavy-handed. It raises the question as to whether the script would not be more suited to the medium of film; particularly in its ability for close-ups, match cuts, and cross-fades. Even the dissolving of time, the bleeding of one character into another (Jacob increasingly confuses his girlfriend Eleanor with his ex-wife Laura), would be more effective on screen. Despite this minor imbalance, the fact remains that the performance sucked me into a bitter-sweet world of emotional conflict and confusion.

Finger In the Pie’s eponymous tale of Sweeney Todd is a grotesque, fearless and jaunty imagining of the youth of the celebrated serial killer. Macabre shadow puppets and psychotically folksy music lend an air of homemade menace to this funny, frightening story. A taut, traumatised, childlike Sweeney stumbles between appalling misadventures, toddling inevitably towards his epiphanic betrayal by the tart with bee-stung lips he gives his heart to. The different devised bits of this piece don’t yet run together as seamlessly as they might, but the ensemble’s energy and gallows humour is infectious, and there’s a memorable song about the virtues of gin that’s like having your brain torn to pieces by alley cats.

Angel by Matt Grinter, which follows, explores the familiar scenario of hostage and captor conversing at unlikely and unnecessary length. The real interest of the piece lies in Sam Donovan’s fine performance as a disintegrating cowboy, with credible horror in his eyes. His body’s all angles and odd contractions, and the dance of his creeping self-loathing is executed with finesse and chilling precision.

The last play of the night, The Muse by Matt Roberts, is a shouty, sprawly story about the collapse of ideals, and relationships falling apart. The depressingly predictable outcome doesn’t get any less predictable for being shoved to the beginning of the piece. But there’s a beautifully choreographed sequence of remembering, which fuses music and dialogue in a psychedelic montage with real style, fluidity and wit. And I’m not sure how or why (it was getting pretty late by this point) but Amy Nostbakken temporarily stole the show with a heartrending, hysterical song about a lost cat.

So, all in all, a night of mixed pleasures. But the Midnight Matinee is a great excuse to stay up late, have a few drinks and enjoy a few surprises, with the possibility of catching a theatrical gem in the making. That’s got to be worth a fiver of anyone’s money.