Matt Trueman is the winner of the 2009 and 2010 Allen Wright Awards for the best reviewer aged 30 or under at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Fixing things is Moira’s fix

Shallow Slumber is no mere in-yer-face exercise. Beneath it are nuanced social points about class and the co-dependence of the care-system and its clients. Not only is Dawn aware of the injustice behind the assumption that she needs a social worker, deep down she knows that, in her case, it’s a fair one.

Watch from an angle

Certainly, the text is delivered with all the tonal variation of Morse code. Reported back, it is stripped of emotion and, to a certain extent, intention. Punctuation becomes garbled, replaced with a steady, but stuttering, flow of words; pauses are scrapped as they struggle to keep pace; language warps. But do we not learn more from a fingerprint than from the lines on a palm, even though the contours offer less contrast?

A good old fashioned postmodern rom-com

Payne isn’t conclusively determinist. His characters still act freely, but their freedom is more limited than either would like to believe. Everything here is contingent: every decision, responsive; every happy ending as sweet and brittle as honeycomb.

To what end?

L’Autre is an advocation of play. Stellato defies the accepted order of things, the one that says square pegs belong in square holes. He encourages us to see with fresh – often quite disbelieving – eyes. At several points, gravity seems to stand back and gift Stellato the floor. He walks a plank that oughtn’t support his weight, until, in a hauntingly tranquil final image, he dissolves into darkness.

Tranquilised gentility

Yann Tiersen style piano music twinkles throughout. Gracious courtly bows and dainty curtsies follow each act. Eliza Doolittle at the Embassy Ball was not so mindful of her p’s and q’s.

A nice line in feigned ineptitude

The ladder, handily placed by a stagehand at the back of the stalls, is hauled through the audience, fast-ducking as it swishes overhead. Placed upside down, apparently unwittingly, it becomes an object so unusual that it is capable of surprising us just as much as them.

A moving magic eye

For long swathes, he stands stationary, but when he moves, each action chimes perfectly with its surroundings. Despite the fact that Umeda could teach Peter Crouch a thing or two about ‘the robot,’ he rejects the virtuosic for the maximum effect. Sometimes its as simple as shifting his weight from one foot to another.

Snagging on a half-whistle

McRae doesn’t so much speak the words as dance them, tapping out syllables like expressive footfalls. His voice is a drum kit; it can rasp like a snare or clatter like cymbals or swish like a soft brushstroke. The moment he hits upon the crucial detail – ‘That was it,’ he says – his vocal chords seems to have become corroded by an upsurge of stomach acid.

An axe to the family tree

Like a home-made Father’s Day present, Frankland & Sons is to be prized not for itself, but for the love with which it is made. It seems held together in a tangled clot of sellotape and string, but the thought that counts is abundantly clear and worth displaying.

A Welfare State Mowgli

Fog is a play with its roots to the right. Its society is rudderless; expectant of reward rather than willing to earn it. Meaning has been lost, such that estate blocks are named after Romantic poets and rosaries are empty fashion symbols.

The ultimate surly stepson

Just as Sarah Kane twisted Hippolytus into a monster in Phaedra’s Love, Ostermeier strips Hamlet of his nobility and focuses on his faults. He turns what we accept as tragedy into a warped comedy.

Warm as a cuddle

Same Same is elegant, eloquent and hugely empathetic, leaving a strong impression of the parent-child connection that exists only as an abstract idea and an ineffable sensation of longing. It captures mother’s need for daughter and vice versa, but also the fear that holds them back from acting upon it.

Driven by dichotomies

Frontman is itself a front. It’s less a commited exploration of its central figure than a vehicle through which to explore the nature of performance more generally. Focus is largely drawn to the invisible threads between performer and audience.

Theatre at its most journalistic

Its advantage over other media presentations on the subject is that The Riots happens outside of everyday, real time. In other media, an issue intrudes into life momentarily, whereas theatre puts life on hold for the sake of that issue. The Riots open up a space in time, a window of two hours, in which we might properly and purely consider its subject

An ‘Oliver!’ for the 21st century

That a musical should have a message is rare these days. That it should have several – about standing up for yourself, intelligence and the fallibility of adults – is nothing short of astonishing. Matilda never patronises its audience, nor its young performers.

Half-truths, white lies and weaselling flattery

Greg only seems good because he does no wrong, but he doesn’t really ever do right. His one lie is to cover for Kent, but he never tells the whole truth, because - exactly as Kent accuses – he ‘hates not being liked’. The secret of Burke’s performance (and LaBute’s writing) lies in letting the intricacies of this dichotomy seep out so gradually; he gradually opens our eyes to Greg and, by extension, ourselves.

Something ominous beneath the surface

Appreciation requires a certain generosity on the part of its audience. One must plunge under the surface – too often banal and old-fashioned in form – to the conceptual currents swirling beneath, tantalisingly vague and elusive.

Stuttering synapses

Tim Price is very strong on both atmosphere and character. Helped by Chloe Lamford’s design – a breaking wave that sometimes glows to become icy veins – he unnerves from the very first moment. Iola and Anest, tethered together, twirl and babble with one another like a pair of Wyrd Sisters.

Humid, but never heated

Ross Anderson’s wholesome butcher, the object of Yerma’s fancies, and Alison O’Donnell’s crude Maria (they’re always called Maria, aren’t they?) set up strong contrasts with the malnourished central couple.

Doubly disaligned

Repan’s Helge orchestrates the party like a military parade, dishing out prescribed roles to his children and demanding that proceedings run to plan. Chairs must be perfectly aligned; glasses, spotlessly clean.

Caught between two possible answers

Woodcock’s point is that the nature of overseas aid, not to mention the motivations behind it, is as important as the mere fact of it. To borrow momentarily from Brass Eye, there exists good aid and bad aid. It is remarkably easy for the hand that giveth to be the same one that ultimately taketh away.

A trace of kindness

She begs, silently, unable to express the pain – both physical and mental – in words. We look on as incapable of helping as she is herself. It is one of the most gut-wrenching experiences I have ever had in the theatre.

No better way to open a theatre

Chris Goode’s ‘The Loss of All Things’ (Philippians) finds in St Paul’s activity echoes of a peaceful, but provocative, revolution against an old order, as two gay schoolboys wear down their teacher with passive resistance during his detention. Stella Duffy’s ‘The Book of Ruth (and Naomi)’ humanises the text with an empathetic and emotive version told from inside rather than out.

A domestic fantasia

The aim is to marry expressionism with a modern ‘neurotic middle-classes’ slant on the original myth, but, for all that I admire the ambition of Georgina Sowerby and Jon Lee’s production, the two sides neither sit comfortably together nor work on their own terms.

‘Ding! Ding!’

This brute force makes for a feisty watch, but Ervine’s play can’t be granted heavyweight status. It is too sluggish for that, too naïvely absolute. Ervine sees the world in black and white and, while such clashing rival forces produce explosive bouts, they do not belong to the real world. To be worthwhile as well as watchable, it needs a little compromise.

Treat-‘em-mean, keep-‘em-keen

On arrival in the countryside, Kate is served not a fine meal which is then dismissed ‘in reverend care of her’, but a microwaved lasagne dished up in its plastic packaging. Worse still, it’s actually burnt. Is it any surprise that she has trouble sleeping, given that they all seem to be kipping down in sleeping bags?

A painting?

As drama it may be stillborn, but the ideas behind Grief, so finely expressed, are gently horrifying. It is a slow-motion car crash that you can’t tear yourself away from, yet I maintain that, with careful consideration, it could have been distilled into a single image without the slightest loss.

Alien, primitive, empty

Poking about might feel ridiculous, but there’s enough momentary magic – scrawled memories materialising in toilet cubicles, unexpected pubs where kitchenettes should be – to lance the cynicism and the journey itself is well-constructed, building a crescendo as the gravitational pull to the stage increases.

Dazzled by flashing lights and possibility

It’s hard to imagine a production that better captures the essence of Walsh’s seductive play. Cleary conducts the action perfectly, contrasting hormonal heartbeats with oases of calm that suggest teenage sentimentality and glints of suicide.

It wasn’t always this way

Decade is a collage of responses from almost twenty prominent writers and, defying the singularity that might be said to characterise 9/11’s legacy, its strongest suit is its plurality. Taken together, like wide-ranging articles pinned to a noticeboard, they offer a panoramic view, while simultaneously acknowledging the impossibility of anything comprehensive.

Meaning beneath the metaphor

‘How far will it actually go?’ you think, ‘How much will it ask of me?’ After all, the voice is keen to stress that your in-flight actions are real and incur responsibility. It mentions the police. Will I have to deal with the police?

Time for the storytellers

The Faith Machine is a play of accumulation, all the better for revealing its purposes gradually and, even then, never head-on. Campbell steers clear of simplified taglines, but it becomes apparent that he believes God to be dead and society non-existent.

Faustus’ descendants

Faustus and Luther make a cracking odd couple; the one a swaggering silver fox, the other a constipated bore. Sean Campion and Andrew Frame spar with just the right combination of affection and animosity. Of course, the dice are loaded in favour of Faustus’ humanism, and that in itself entails pointed accusation.

I said no

One moment you’re singing with a homeless man, the next, chasing a clown around the Royal Mile. Your willingness to play along, to stand out from the crowd, to offer a kindness, is constantly in question.

A tidy line

Osbourne is a human sheepdog: doltish and awkward, but endearingly benign. He’s the sort of chap grandmothers adore. This curly fringe droops over his forehead. His shoulders hang limp and his hands are never quite sure what to do with themselves.

A ripple becomes a tidal wave

Head tilted, nodding very gently, he bores his stare into us, eyes widened, and implores us to believe him. He is a coiled presence, sinewy but on the edge of explosiveness as he whips us up like a travelling showman.

Deep in blissful simplicity

The London Snorkelling Team, a music and animation combo, offer a deliriously goofy gig, while Frauke Requardt and Makiko Aoyama present the pleasure of dance for dance’s sake. Lewis Gibson, my favourite half-hour thus far this Fringe, goes beyond show and tell, instead treating us to a carefully constructed experience of blissful empty-headedness.

Terminal illness strikes!

The overwhelming problem with The Invisible Show II is that it would be visible from space. Leaving aside the chunky, albeit flesh-toned, radio mics, its repeated re-use of the same four actors means it’s less a case of syncing audio with appropriate visuals than a round of Where’s Wally.

Used and abused

If we allow this particular section its provocative intention, however, as it must have originally worked, Ontroerend Goed have a win-win situation. If we act against them, they can point to the pretence; if not, to the reality. Heads they win, tails we lose.

The potency of pretence

They’re shown as posturing and pretentious; irresponsible, attention-seeking children. Their craft is ridiculed for its inherent absurdity. At times, actors are dismissed as entirely redundant. Theatre can survive without them.

Badges of humanity

This is theatre at its most cathartic, acheiving instant effects that reach beyond the auditorium with wit and empathy. It makes a responsibility of taking responsibility, but it also makes it manageable.

A table-top cartoon

He’s a characterful little thing: knees wobbling when impatient, not quite sure what to do with his hands. Yet, the search for subject matter as he trots out the table’s vital stats still feels baggy, like a rehearsal room improvisation feeling its way.

Capitalism is collusion

McLaren spent a month singing instead of speaking, just as they do in Doris Day musicals, recording every encounter on his trusty lapel microphone. That decision makes him a social pariah: people stare at him or walk away, unable to make head nor tail of him.

The ordinary given a sprinkling of glitter

Either we appreciate the songs or we ridicule the songstress. Better taken as slight musical musings with a hefty dollop of whimsy, The Caroline Carter Show is more showcase than show, never really adding up to a satisfying whole.

Beneath the spaceman’s visor

Bowden makes a welcoming, sometimes impish, narrator with a slight overreliance on kooky charm. It’s his writing, however, pristine and fragile, that really deserves plaudits. As his tale gains matter, his text finds a purity, particularly where love is concerned.

Movement is everything

Catalina, always pregnant but never with child, becomes a model of regeneration. She must pop out kids like a vending machine, unconcerned about their upbringing. Yet, like the Ark itself, everything remains entirely potential and, being unfinished, potential always contains doubt, the danger being that it will not be reached. Hence, the crash that blows the system.

Little shoulder-devils

There’s a nagging suspicion that the Paper Birds want it both ways. After wheeling through a panoply of pissheads, they can get away with the hackneyed old binge Britain idea because they never meant to, honest guv. The show pulls them in its own direction, it runs away of its own accord.

Empathy and intrigue

Theatrical explorations of memory are often fragmented and scruffy, padding around the subject rather than pinpointing the core. Molaison’s case, told by crossfading between his life before and after the operation, allows Analogue to approach a prevalent subject with a rare neatness.

The paradox of mime

Everything Reid does blends into one, not through lack of distinction on his part, but because distraction comes before narrative drive. We simply stop caring enough to bother distinguishing.

The untamed mischief of Mann

Imagine if Cinderella, while trying to get the ball, fell asleep for a thousand years, her hair growing out of the window to form a ladder, while her mother gets shot by huntsmen and her father trampled by stampeding gazelle.

Ignoring the mould for the materialism

Told through intersecting monologues, A Slow Air is as precise a piece of writing as you’ll find. Its primary narrative is engaging enough, but, thanks to Harrower’s eye for metaphor and symbol, it’s the currents underneath the text that really make this special. Almost every moment is loaded with a hidden significance.

Love itself, ineffable

There’s a spider-diagram dilettantism to I Hope My Heart Goes First that means it skims the surface of its subject. Musings on familial love, in which two sisters end up in a brawl, material love and social pressures sit alongside a biological lecture on the heart.

Ambition at the double

Four young writers, two young directors and a predominantly youthful cast make Double Feature something of a rarity for a theatre dominated by absolutely established talent. These are the artists that usually go unseen in the National’s ecology, tucked away in the safety of the National Theatre Studio, so it’s rather great to see them pushed into the public arena with all its challenges.

The chair keeps on rocking

McDonagh’s dramatic irony is thicker than Mag’s Complan. It is a play full of Ibsen’s famous hanging guns, largely because the implements of torture (hot oil, poker, Complan) are so tantalising, not to show them used would be negligent. It feels too pristinely constructed – all polish, no turd - not that it prevented the youthful first-night audience from gasping along.

‘You see Dad, this isn’t me’

That formula, for all that Harris carries it off with verve and swagger to provide an enjoyable entertainment, is very simple. At it’s heart is routine - a mind-numbing task that gives characters something to do and a reason to be present.

We don’t gasp, we admire

Wunderkammer is different. It moves by dint of vulnerability. Not the sort that depends on danger, but simple, honest, human frailty. After 85 minutes of tumbling and trapeze, the six performers strip down to their smalls and stand facing us, frank and self-assured with natural, gawky beauty.

Brazenly generic

Gill’s family portrait is more barbed than the usual Royal Court fare, largely because its sneer is overt. Dad trades arms and Mum is terrified of ‘the Ethnics’, presuming all but one – a nice chap who works in the bank, who ‘has been naturalised…taken on our culture’, – carry as much threat as Somali pirates. Son and Daughter, meanwhile, bristle with an open sexual tension

What the National Theatre is for

It is a voice that grazes ear-melting beauty, only to fall short and plummet away from it. His syllables warp like melted metal and a scratchiness riles as fingernails on the underside of a mug induce squirms. Scott’s is a voice that rings in your ears for days afterwards.

A gradual winding down

It is basically a live, adult-sized hanging mobile – hypnotic, regressive and ungraspable – designed not simply to anaesthetise, but to ease the passage to slumber. A distraction to ward off the bedtime panics that can spring from nowhere.

A brilliant pantomime of pain

Chainsaws rip through cartilage, electric drills bore into brains and sickles hook intestines like rubber ducks from a fairground stall. Thick strands of arterial blood loop through the air. It’s almost graceful in its brutality, haunted by the spectres of Kubrick, Hitchcock and Tarantino.

King Canute of the Countryside Alliance

That strain of sentimentality is the chink in the piece’s armour. It needs the present-tense tinge of sadness of golden-hued nostalgia and that, of course, fades from view. Leave the theatre and the surrounding city feels, for a while, unnatural and all-pervasive, unstoppable, but it will not do so for long.

Belch and carry on

Two friends, a boy and a girl, gather round the coolbox, gorging on beer and ice-lollies, almost to the point of choking. They talk in that wry tone of smartass teenage irony that sees every sentence, like, broken up and, um, rising at the end. As if they’re, you know, afraid to commit or incapable of caring. Any sincerity is pockmarked and punctured.

Mere demonstration

Given that it serves the sound effects, rather than vice versa, this narrative serves only as connective tissue. In which case it doesn’t really matter that Bannon has stripped her thriller of thrills with an advance warning of murder.

Another Acykbourn?

Rather than attack a specific issue or idea, Reiss grazes a number of them. It’s almost like she checks them off, touching base and flitting elsewhere. The upshot, however, is that The Acid Test (and, it now seems, Spur of the Moment before it) reflects a portion of our society rather than commenting on it.

‘I am not historically significant’

It posits history and, with it, current affairs, as mere entertainment, fulfilling a basic human need for narrative. The macro cannot be mined from the micro. History becomes an empty vessel. Or, as Rapley emphatically puts it, ‘a wrinkled old woman dressed as a young seductress wearing too much make up’.

All fisticuffs and innuendo

Commedia is, like end of the pier, essentially a structured series of turns (here, we get front-curtain musical numbers from each of the cast) and Goldoni’s servant will always be best when pulled in two directions by conflicting and easily confusable tasks. Corden, then, is perfectly cast as the hapless go-between.

Enlightenment through demonstration

If the terrorist has become a cultural staple, Told By an Idiot are determined to chip off the old schlock. Torn from their original settings, these examples no longer seem stock villains. They stop functioning as plot-driving antagonists; those that afford heroes their heroism.

Occult ritual reconstituted

The pentagram through which Judge is drawn is still a pentagram and the words in Rob Glover’s soundscore, which includes preaching form occultist Aleister Cowley and Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan, invoke the devil in spite of being recordings. How fake, one has to ask, is this? The niggling idea that it’s symbolism and conjury retain their potency.

A restless magic show

At base, then, it is a circularly purposeless act: an event that exists solely to leave traces of its own existence. An act that, at first glance, seems destined to fail.

‘What? They’re going to…’

Haters gonna hate; aficionados gonna afish, capice? In truth, it’s a more balanced affair: half brilliant, half overblown hot air. The overall impression left behind is of a distorted beauty and an intelligent concept later scuppered by laziness and hyperbolic iconoclasm.

A thousand monkeys punching holes

A symphony in Morse Code. It’s often densely layered, parts flickering with rampant speed as others creep by. Beeps, ticks and deep electronic groans combine. It sounds like R2D2 having an aneurism.

A book, you realise, occurs in time

It will leave you desperate to fall into a good book. Its celebration of libraries, though initially atmospheric, is wholly related to their purpose as houses of books. For that reason, rather than anything anecdotal or circumstantial, they feel special.

A muddle of gauche and louche

You can easily imagine Aunt Edna choking on her boiled sweets, given its raw, panting sexuality and heated aggression. Cause Célèbre is no tamed three-acter, confined to drawing-room civility. In the way it wriggles around time and space, it’s jagged and complex, fidgety and ambitious.

What do you want?

Ross is so psychologically-astute that any planned manipulation falls out perfectly. His use of reverse-psychology and carrot-stick methodologies are beyond exemplary. With such slickness, the danger is that Pip Donaghy veers into Bond-villain territory, a problem exacerbated by Ross’s being wheelchair-bound and dressed in black.

Murkiness clearing

Stan’s Cafe offer some beautifully elegant moments, none more so than a woman in a black hijab watched over by another in the traditional white garb of the spa: dressing gown, towel-turban and face mask.

Undercooked

Dramaturgically, it’s a patchwork quilt that doesn’t quite stitch together. Immersive, experiential theatre clatters up against story-telling, such that one is never quite sure whether one is in the story or outside of it.

A rainbow of umbrellas

This is not merely theatre for children, but children’s theatre in the fullest sense. The specially made auditorium is child-sized, meaning that adult knees almost reach adult shoulders. Stepping in feels rather like striding into Lilliput.

Not the world, but a window on it

Even if Lepage can’t wholly circumnavigate the problem of cultural relativity, however, his craft is par excellence. Handling such global currents in such a compact and domestic three-hander is quite an astonishing achievement and Lepage’s composition is characteristically taut.

To save the planet, innit

Jauntily awkward and jittery with uncertainty, Flynn has tapped so astutely into the rhythm of Bean’s writing that almost everything he says comes laced with laughter. He performs Ben’s logical somersaults, counter-intuitive but – to his surprise as much as ours – keenly astute, with a deft instinct for pause and punchline.

Standard issue

The trouble is Water’s transparency. The mind-map of ideas is so close to the surface that none of these connections seem intrinsic to the drama. The connection actually turns out to be an arbitrary additional.

Clowns playing clowns

Too often Nani and Ingimarsson trundle through tired and predictable pratfalls, their respective statuses inevitably, tiresomely see-sawing.

Creatures of the screen let loose

Here, desire boils down to desirability. People are commodities. Women flit coquettishly, their sheeny dresses catching the light like diamonds on display. Across the room, men make eyes like magpies.

Dextrous and daft

In the middle of this menagerie, Sobelle and Ford try – and often fail – to co-exist. She, all a gangle, desperately seeks his affirmation. He, obsessive-compulsive and increasingly sociopathic, is best left to his own devices.

The pantry’s own Parthenon

Even if the aesthetic is more impressive than the manipulation, Les Antliaclastes handle a very delicate balance throughout. It’s like a vision of Hell glimpsed in a saucer of milk.

An annotated heart-palpitation

Sans Objet might just be theatre’s Terminator moment. It plucks the cast into the air like toys in a perfect arcade machine, before lifting huge chunks of the stage and standing them vertically. But it does so entirely without strain or effort, a factor we expect of the most human of art forms.

Two rogue toymakers in an underground lair

After a while, there’s no questioning the wisdom of a vacuum-cum-shredder that sucks up, chews up and spits paper skywards. Worryingly, you wonder whether it might even make sense.

A goofy gorilla on a Ripper’s rampage

The puerility of its humour, often reliant on puppets demonstrating animal urges and functions, infantilises its audience, offering immediate visual gags rather than developing the comedy from the situation.

Beckett in reverse

Handke’s text is a whirligig of formal logic. Ifs, thens, ands and buts flash past you like passing headlights on a highway. It stretches out like a tangled equation chalked on a vast blackboard. Every X is only a Y; Every this is that, he intones, turning the words over and over, inside and out, as if puzzling out a Rubik’s cube.

Not sex. Swimming.

What happens, aged 24 or 30, when it’s no longer possible? What happens when, like the musty, drained pool in which Amphibians plays, you are no longer fit for purpose? Max and Elsa are faced, in another savvy metaphor, with adapting to terra firma, and Max, at least, is all at sea.

Effortless pathos

The charm of Robins’ work is undeniable, even if there is a tendency to drift towards the twee. Certainly, he overplays the scuffed performance aesthetic of mangled manipulation and apologises far too readily from his piano.

Smashing sensibilities

Get Santa is more Nickelodeon than CBBC. It feels like Doctor Seuss on a sugar rush: all E-numbers and artificial colourings. Kids will go wild.

..and an Xbox

1927 have cracked the enigma of integrating live action and projected image. Where before it traded on its own awkwardness, the innovative technique has graduated to a slickness that allows it to be truly spectacular.

Where three-inch bullets fly and IEDs lurk

It reeks of testosterone and temper, scarily so, but it also glints with homo-eroticism and grace. Its beauty – its unexpected delicacy, its sudden familiarity – slams home the distance. Sat here, good little liberals all, we don’t know the half of it.

Smarty-panto

Much has been made about the improbability of arch-experimentalist Mitchell helming a children’s show. Far more unlikely, in my opinion, would be directors wedded to psychoanalytical realism; Howard Davies, for example, or Michael Grandage.

Angelic delights and foul mouths

Perhaps it is churlish to scuff the polish of the Court’s recent success, but one can’t help but consider the wider implications of the theatre’s voguishness. Might it be affecting the causes being tackled by our playwrights? One can easily imagine the country’s literary agents racking their brains for Court-friendly topics and cooking up a new genre: the Moben kitchen-sink drama.

Essence of Macbeth

That airiness, the delicacy and precision with which Song of the Goat work, lends their Macbeth a beauty. One that grips your senses from all directions and holds you in suspense. Not the suspense of a well-told tale, but a physical, felt suspense.

The non-biodegradable and the dead

It is as if a modern – even oddly futuristic – woman has resorted to the wilderness, escaping the expectations of urban domesticity for a primitive existence of totemic rituals.

Guarded and susceptible

The most obvious strand Carnesky draws out is that of death. The guillotine and electric chair – both of which are employed, albeit in pretence – remind us that to stare at a waxwork is to observe one’s own corpse. And yet, like the executions Carnesky enacts, it is marked by its artifice and approximation.

Treading air

The truth is, for all is gentle humour and humanity, Parachutists remains rather ordinary. Even when they hang a vast orange parachute as a swing, they rock only back and forth, smiling sweetly at us and each other. It never takes you anywhere, preferring instead to offer objects and body parts for ticklish examination – never transformation.

This array of morons

Rather than let punches emerge from the politics, Bisset-Smith shapes the system according to the needs of his satire. As a result, despite being faced with the easiest political target this century, The Charming Man ends up flapping loosely and limply before simply wearing itself out.