The show’s verbatim scenes veer between the surreal minutiae of workplace small-talk, direct confidences and casually outrageous sexual frankness. The mundane and the comic jostle against an underscore of muted disappointment, with the odd shocking lurch into scarifying darkness. It’s a bit like watching Dinnerladies intercut with flashes of hardcore porn. It’s endearing, but eye-opening and unflinching.

The cast are a wonderful collection of painfully real women: courageously inelegant and commandingly matter-of-fact. Debbie Chazen is Tessa, small-businesswoman and single-mum, good-hearted, world-weary and indomitably cheery. Beatie Edney is riveting as auburn-haired Susie, whose wittered platitudes and delusions of social acceptance imperfectly mask creeping loneliness and grief. And Lu Corfield turns in a performance of show-stopping comic horror as tattooed, cigarette-burned, cider-swigging Poppy, jaw-droppingly vulnerable in her vacuous, generous, shambolic unconcern for her own welfare.

Blythe’s confident, unpatronising editing allows her subjects to speak for themselves, reflecting on the risks and rewards of exposing their lives to public view. Her method of having performers in headphones, through which are piped the voices of their real-world alter-egos, may be a mite exhibitionist, but does serve as a marker of the difference between what we’re seeing onstage and its original sources and context.

I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this show much, but The Girlfriend Experience – unpretentious and funny – thoroughly overturned my squeamish preconceptions. Tackling still-taboo subjects with respect, warmth and realism, it’s the most honest, educational and unexpectedly life-affirming play I’ve seen in a very long time.

Benedetti’s interpretation of the text, with a single female actor onstage, speaking directly to the audience, focuses on the rhythms and cycles of Kane’s writing to access different states of the character’s emotions. The direction draws attention to the resonance of the writing, questioning the nature of humanity now. As 4:48 progresses from time of desperation to time of sanity, the play becomes a symbol of human malady.

Anamaria Marinca embodies both despair and wit, speaking from only one point onstage throughout the performance, with two open doors behind her. Her eyes are warm, and her rare smile offers a pleasant shift in texture. The silences, stillness and sincerity are the most powerful elements in this production. It’s an ongoing discussion between Anamaria and the audience, not so much an appeal but a dialogue. Under the austere lighting, she sometimes appears like an insect, vulnerable, angry; and it is in her posture and her mode of address that we access thoughts, feelings, states of being, not a whole person but the myriad facets that make up that person.

For those who have seen Anamaria Marinca in the film 4 Luni, 3 Săptămâni, 2 Zile (4 Months,3 Weeks and 2 Days) , there is a strong parallel between her character in the film and the way she communicates with the audience in 4:48: dangerous and vulnerable at the same time, confrontational, trying to reach a state of normality.

This production of 4:48 Psychosis toys with human nature and theatrical convention. While Anamaria Marinca seems to face her own dark side – natural and, at times, impulsive – Benedetti asks us to rethink Kane’s writing once more. So that maybe now, in light of our times, we can understand a different side of her. In the director’s own words, ‘It’s an attempt at an answer, the temptation of a winking eye’.

The show’s obsession with the composer’s various sexual anguishes quite quickly becomes repetitive and reductive, imposing a constricting paraphrase of psychobabble upon potentially much more resonant material. There’s the inevitable quota of bared breasts and buttocks on display, a nursery nightmare of a testicle-chewing gnome, a coolly unattainable mother, and an ever-retreating array of same-sex lovers framed in doorways, but all the libidinous angst seems contrived, rather than deriving from the strident, haunting phrases of Mussorgsky’s vivid music.

In this dance-theatre collaboration between the Young Vic and Sadler’s Wells, the dancing seems sparse, often gimmicky, and occasionally ill-conceived. It’s tempting to discern the influence of too many inexperienced hands in the choreography’s superficial diffuseness. James Fenton’s text is sometimes striking, and sometimes emptily declamatory, while much swigging of vodka and bouts of delirium tremens become a fairly tiresome pretext for ever-more-frenetic narrative fragmentation.

There are some theatrically satisfying moments, like a vaudevillian Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks, and a piano lesson tending towards chaos (and invasion by elephants), where music and physical performance seem to coalesce within a vigorous and mischievous company storytelling. Richard Hudson’s design, with its Alice-in-Wonderland oversized doors and inaccessible vistas, also achieves a playful fluidity that seems to elude other aspects of the production.

Pictures from an Exhibition is a show that leaves you humming Mussorgsky’s Promenade, but otherwise unchallenged and unenlightened. A bold and intriguing project has descended into an insubstantial and prurient biopic.

While I decide whether or not I’m in a giving mood, here are the publicly available facts. Tunnel 228 is a free but limited capacity art-exhibition-cum-theatrical-installation, the result of a collaboration between Punchdrunk, the Old and Young Vic theatres and a selection of contemporary artists. Booking had been open, but kept hush-hush, for four days when The London Paper gave the game away, prompting the remaining slots to book up in a matter of hours.

While I disagree with Matt Trueman’s suggestion that the freesheet’s article invited undeserving participants to the event, for three reasons – a) it smacks uncomfortably of elitism and arbitrary judgments of ‘worthiness’ to experience art; b) the article was an innocuous one on page six that would most likely only have appealed to Punchdrunk fans anyway; and c) his notional ‘deserving’ fans had a four-day headstart – he does make one vital point. Tunnel 228 isn’t meant to be found (i.e. stumbled upon at random); you’re meant to find it (i.e. actively seek it out).

The booking site, disguised behind a tacky frontpage advertising a rail cleaning service, is difficult to find unless you know you’re looking for something (if not exactly what that something will turn out to be). The entrance to the venue is nearly impossible to locate unless you’ve found the website.

Even once you’re inside, there’s no guidance to be had from the stewards: they’re mute unless they’re telling you what you aren’t allowed to do. The onus is on you; on your self-motivated voyage of discovery. Will you attempt to figure out the origin and purpose of the Rube Goldberg machine? Hunt down the man immortalised in mural form on various walls? Seek out all Slinkachu’s miniature dioramas? Or just make it your mission to explore every corner – even the ones you’re not sure you’re allowed in?

That’s all I’m giving you in the way of hints. You’ll thank me if, as Old Vic Artistic Director Kevin hopes, the tunnel reopens in the autumn, and you can experience the thrill of discovery unspoiled.

As you enter the space, you’re spirited away by the choir in full song. It is an explosion of the senses with song, dance and food (the women of the family are on stage cooking) on display. The choir sings several rounds, firing up a frenzy in the audience who, though slow off the mark, soon get drawn into foot-tapping, head-bopping and clapping to the beat. When the singing subsides and the choir takes its position at the periphery, Debbie Tucker Green’s text begins.

Like the circle songs that graced the opening, the writing also works in circular form. The dialogue between generations is quickly established as a skat-like repetition of speech around the themes of cooking and courtship. It is set up so that each of the six characters on stage and one young man off stage, gets a part in the canon. The first round of dialogue is very comical, exposing each of the character’s idiosyncrasies with battles of opinion on who taught who to cook and who flirted with who first; old and young, father and wife, mother and daughters, all respond with grit and fervor. But after the first round is over, there’s a momentary pause in the action, and a choral lament accompanies the youngest daughter as she makes a slow and solemn exit.

Once she has left the stage the next round of dialogue begins, and little by little the characters leave the stage in order of age, working themselves down to just the two grandparents. They are left staring in hollow despair; they’ve outlived their children, they’ve outlived their grandchildren and for a moment the order of their world is spun out and over turned.

Few words in the text change from beginning to end, but when they do it is all the more poignant. And although nothing explicit is said about where, when, who or how, two words in the last cycle of speech, ‘dying’ and ‘disease’ evoke something of South Africa’s downhill struggle with HIV AIDS. The rest is up to the audience to decipher through subtext and suggestive choral moods, perfectly arranged by Pauline Malefane.

The departure of loved ones is a theme that most of us will deal with in our lives, and at best we hope for peaceful departures, but what Debbie Tucker Green puts on stage in (seemingly) simple, almost game-like manner, is the fragility and vulnerability of some lives over others. Generations is a solemn piece with that leaves its audience in a state of serious contemplation.

While the foyer may feel somewhat like a museum of contemporary art and design, hidden away behind the scenes, in two very attractive performance spaces, was the stuff of childhood marvel. The small studio space was housing a hands-on theatre piece for toddlers and to be honest it felt like walking through a dream. On my way out I came across a local school outing milling in the foyer. The kids had just finished watching Tom’s Midnight Garden in the main auditorium and while the empty, minimal foyer has felt somewhat cold and daunting on the way in, it had now been transformed into a raucous, jubilant playground and the kids were ecstatic.

Shifting forward to the present day, and an article in the Guardian newspaper, by artistic director, David Lan, covers the regeneration project of the Young Vic theatre. Lan explains how he took on the enormous feat of raising £12.45m from 2002 onwards, partly through persuading the Arts Council that the then dilapidated theatre was worthy of rebuilding and partly through a succesful fundraising campaign spearheaded by Jude Law and many other well-wishers and funding bodies. The result will be open to public scrutiny in November this year.

From the outside, the project is showing all the hallmarks of another ultra-modern urban edifice, and while I am by no means opposed to modern architectural design, I do question the effect it has on the whole theatre ‘experience’. I cannot help but feel drawn to a type of theatre that goes on in murky, dim-lit spaces. The Shunt Vaults in London Bridge for example, a space that feels alive and breathing when you enter, albeit breathing like an old man puffing on a yellow Gauloise, but there is a tactile sense of history in old theatre spaces and I have always found that attractive. Certainly, such large-scale projects like the Unicorn and the Young Vic are signs of a healthy theatre industry, but it’s the ‘industry’ that bothers me. The red tape, the strings attached to funding bodies, the health and safety rules, the milimeter inspections etc etc. I openly encourage David Lan to hold onto his idea of saying ‘no to nothing’, unless that ‘nothing’ is the stale breath of government breathing down his neck, prescribing agendas.