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

Synesthetes of us all

The mode is rigorously spare and yet never sparse. Each piece has a huge depth of tone, thanks to precise attention to atmosphere and, most importantly, rhythm. Lone Twin pitch their pacing deliberately out of sync with the world and, through repetition, force us to abandon everyday timeframes. They draw out sonic textures from movement – footfalls and breath, claps and clicks – and stretch them until you snuggle in and your blood pumps in time.

A man most notoriously absolved

This is a production driven by canny characterisation rather than design. What it offers, even where some are less persuasive than others, are interesting subversions of classic roles.

‘A slumber-party vibe’

Indiscriminate and meandering it may be, but Sweet just about manages to pull it together somehow. Perched firmly on the spectrum, he fidgets his way around the stage, shattering social conventions and manhandling his audience like a safari chimpanzee.

Roundabout cabaret

In an assortment of petite poems and mumbled musings, Key offers a pointillist portrait of modern, urban existence. ‘Tanya googled herself / Still nothing,’ reads one. Others cover thrill-seeking colleagues skinning eels in their lunch-break, the moments in which relationships crack, and ‘the thorny issue of dew’.

Pulsating with pluralism

I found the particularities of less import than the abstract archetypes underpinning them. To exert too much effort into the narrative is almost to lose sight of the pointed philosophy beneath. The preaching, in other words, has more resonance than the preachers.

Ethical striptease

Does one wrong turn really deserve another? Martinez is clearly not driven by a thirst for vengeance, but at the centre of My Stories, Your Emails is a nasty streak, not dissimilar to the impulse to share viral quirks and spread shame.

A gentle tickle and a reluctant smile

UK circus trio Mimbre are oversweet and underseasoned. After a while, I couldn’t shake off the comparison with advertising for pro-biotic yoghurts, in which the demonstration of enjoyment never rings true.

The mind left hanging

We come close to whiplash each time he drops twenty feet, stopping himself just before smacking the floor. Such is his skill – shown in the collectedness demonstrated by the careful dropping of a marble to match its descent and catch it softly at the bottom – that we come to trust him over time, settling in to a calm admiration. His precision, even when holding himself stiffly parallel to the stage, is phenomenal.

Brave New World

The impulse to zoomorphise, or further still anthropomorphise, is here turned in on itself, such that we become caught up between the illusion and its actual component counterparts. In the former, Nicole Massoux creates an entire alien ecosystem out of a jumble sale’s worth of junk, animating allsorts into peculiar lifeforms. Johnson’s raw material, by contrast, is her body alone, which she twists and contorts.

Beckett with balls

They stare straight ahead, as if they are overlooking a landscape; simultaneously seers and fools on a hill. As for their juggling itself, it embodies the governing qualities of Kantian aesthetics, welding together the sublime and the ridiculous.

Thought-provoking graft

The paradox is that we are watching work as leisure and, soothing though it may be to watch, The Mill demands too little of us. Like an overly helpful guest, it is neat, tidy and excellent company, but insists on doing all the hard work for you.

Dissociation and rupture of self

It is a story without absolute sinners and saints; one of forced hands and impossible positions. The puppeteers are simultaneously guard and guardian, enforcer and protector.

Jangle-brained ducks

Though it is the ongoing series of entrances and exits that wear you down, it remains hard to stay engaged once you realise that nothing will change or grow.

An Escheresque city of stretched possibilities

It thumps with existential enquiry, begging questions of identity, imperfection and our place within the world. Repeatedly – and often quite literally – human forms become objects and what was inanimate becomes oppositely anthropomorphised. Actions and reactions ripple around the space as if the Butterfly effect were the sole governing principle.

More mirage than miracle

The real criminal in all this is the space itself, which simply won’t allow for our presence to go unacknowledged. Belle Mundi’s design, serviceable though it is, feels like a museum approximation with its clutter of vague gothic crap and painted on stones.

Quixotic sighs and beery banter

Golaszewski understands love. Or, at least, he makes you understand love. The absence of those around him – perfect Betty, with her FHM arse and toothy smile, and near-perfect life-partner Pudding – means that we fall for his partners too. They exist as our ideals. His words leap through our ears, swish around our brains and set our hearts aflicker.

Aching frustration

I must admit to being adrift in an enthusiastic audience with a heavy contingent of youth. I can see that 1984 would work as an introduction to theatre that dares to defy fourth-wall realism without resorting to pantomime, but it sorely lacks the self-reflexivity and all-questioning attitude that has helped the BAC to thrive.

Woolly wonderland

The language tossed between the twins retains the oversimplicity of children’s theatre. At times, it purifies, as, for example, when they say of their dead mother, ‘her skin is the colour of peeled apple’. Elsewhere, it becomes a cloying, babyish gargle, as in, ‘this book was once a tree’.

Approach gently

The size of the site and the logistics entailed have clearly derailed the attention to detail, and we are politely requested to turn a blind eye. The audio-guide orders your gaze one way in order that the mechanics of the piece can slip by unnoticed behind you. Only, of course, they don’t.

Unexpected death right on cue

Essentially, it’s a puppetry mash-up of The Mutant Chronicles and The Boat that Rocked with a dash of the socio-political setting of The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks

Fake fangs

That the joins between fiction and reality, the mechanics of the piece, are so evident, so clunky, prevents any real commitment to the fiction spun. Resistance is not so much futile as inevitable.

Not Made in Russia

The show subverts the very notion of cross-cultural identity against itself, undermining international presentation as a pretentious, even bourgeois, cultural practice. The need to label according to nationality or origin is, they suggest, preposterous and in doing so we seek only to confirm our own preconceptions about other cultures.

Death in Berlin

Gob Squad’s twenty-minute film remakes seven cinematic death sequences in and around Berlin’s public spaces. Playing on two screens, allowing comparison between the original and its everyday echo, it captures the sentiment and simultaneously sends it up: emotion marinated in ridicule.

Bezzie mates

Eleni Edipidi and Bethanie Harrison make a clownish double act. Sharing stark Frida Karlo monobrows drawn on in marker pen, they create flashes of touching comedy but lack a strictly defined hierarchy that would allow their routines to gain momentum.

Because I can

Yet, this is no Murder Mystery party; there is no sense of acting. You, yourself, are very much present in the small town. Your decisions remain yours, not those that your character might make. Not only does this remove awkward inhibitions, it allows the piece an ethical and political dimension beyond the bounds of the small town. You feel the weight of betrayals as much as the excitement of transgressions.

Chameleonic larynx

As an X Factor graduate herself, we cannot but associate Diana Vickers with Little Voice, as a young girl used to singing into hairbrushes, plucked from everyday life and bunged on a stage. We marvel at the actress, Little Voice and Diana Vickers all at once. The conflated whole strengthened by the mutual support of its constituent parts.

A circus of the self

There is a certain tragedy about this first Raoul. He is a man always at odds with himself; a hapless figure forever tying himself in knots. He tries to cross his legs only for them to slip off one another. He tries to play music, but gets only the grainy crackle of scratched vinyl or the final combative blasts of an elusive symphony.

Paths not taken

The Factory rely on our foreknowledge of the play. We are forced to make our own sense, to complete the jigsaw for ourselves. The form itself offers no comment on the content – any text could be tackled similarly without loss. To watch is to discover anew, but also to clarify, refine and confirm ideas already held.

Absolute mutuality

There are frissons of foreplay alongside lashings of aggression.They hang off each other and collide; dance, kiss and strike; become entranced by one another; become repelled. Yet, as it churns through this assortment, there is none of the clunking awkwardness that so often drags down such broad explorations.

Cake, alcohol and a well-groomed schoolboy

With few surprises in the narrative, the interest lies in how and why the fallout occurs. As such, much of the responsibility rests with Jaime Winstone as the disruptive Sherbert and, on her stage debut, she handles it superbly. A mismatched neon nightmare with peroxide bunches sprouting from the sides of her head, Jaime Winstone resembles an unkempt, neglected Barbie caked in cosmetics to compensate.

No place like it

Having already pitched itself in town squares and docks, woodland and grassy plains, on high-streets and ferries, Home sits neatly in the musky gloom of the Southwark Playhouse.

Shambolic aplomb

Here, style is not used to compensate for content, dressing it up in order to disguise its flimsiness. Instead, the style is the content. If anything, it dresses down, allowing a relish of the tarnished performance that maintains the crucial tipsiness of atmosphere, which is initially constructed through personal welcomes and pointers to the bar.

Dipstick for a generation

On the cusp of their thirties, Sam and Anna are indicative of a generation’s fear of genuine responsibility, its disinclination to difficulties and its inability to appreciate anything with the slightest of flaws.

Fear is white

Lucy Ellinson is a phenomenon. She tears the text open as if ripping off a scab to re-expose a wound. Words clacker from her mouth with the rhythm of a typewriter, then stop; suspended mid-epiphany. Every choice she makes is elevated with detail and curiosity.

Deep-set and heartfelt

Nic Green, a 28-year-old artist based in Scotland, asks what it means to be a young woman today. In two attitude-altering hours teeming with ideas, politics and, most of all, courage, Green and her company dissect an inherited, outdated feminism to find a voice that is resolutely, powerfully their own.

Wounding-scarring-real-world nasty

Using the behavioural techniques of pick-up artists, made famous by Neil Strauss’ bestselling exposé The Game, Internal’s performers have an almost universal success rate in seduction. They extract everything they need without seeming to twist your arm.

Drink beer and eat chips

Oh, My Green Soap Box is a scatty but smart theatrical essay about good intentions and guilty consciences. We can, she says, always do more; we can always act better. There will always be polar bears that need saving.

Face the music and dance

Not only is there no evidence of careful craft, the material technology onstage becomes a concern as flat screens collide and threaten to keel over. When they go cold turkey on this habit, however, things improve immeasurably.

Lurking menace

Jittery with shock, Liam has just witnessed a young man viciously attacked by a knifeman, slashed all over rather than stabbed. He cradled the victim in his lap until, suddenly, the man leapt up and legged it; bleeding and running, running and bleeding.

Leggings and lyrca

Tumbling around the stage, they seem forged from tightly-coiled springs and slinkies. Together, they are a tight-knit and well-balanced unit. Where one is an effete and airy presence, another is an open-mouthed, fiery force; one, a louche, creeping reptile; another, an armour-plated beetle with a big appetite.

Masterful marionettes come unstrung

It’s been five years since Heap Cruziack and Pebble Adverati last laced up their skates and danced competitively, but now, in spite of the extinction of ice-rinks, the world champions are intent on a glorious comeback. Thus, dressed in glacial-grey chiffon, they take to the wooden floor and skate with polished smiles and clumsy feet.

Absolute faith in the magic of theatre

Yes, The Lamplighter’s Lament is guilty of the sort of sentimentality and slightness born of uninterrogated devised theatre, but it’s enchanting stuff nonetheless. Providing, of course, you allow it to be so.

Life and soul in the dregs of society

Keith Fleming – last seen as a perma-pissed Peer Gynt – cements his position as Scotland’s premier portrayer of alcoholics. His Henry seems to have grown around the bar like ivy, typewriter and Bud always within easy reach. In him is a vintage blend of gentleness and fire that lurks under an infantile passivity, as he is led one way and another by booze and birds.

Game over, cheerio, goodbye, next chapter

Relying on the standard formula of situation comedy, Reynolds places a range of characters into a single set of circumstances and – ta-da – conflict materialises. Beyond the equation itself, however, she manages to get nothing right. Her characters are so one-dimensional it’s a wonder that they’re even perceptible.

Smart and ticklish

Hughes greets us in the queue, remembers names and then plays perfect host, breaking the ice and spinning connections amongst his audience. Within minutes, he has transformed us into a parish and, from that point on, Hughes is preaching to the converted.

Muted barks

All is made cuddly, from the Disneyfied strays in woolly hats to Alex Bryne’s Elvis-impersonating paedophile. While the intention may be to show through childish eyes, the result is to mute the story’s drama.

A war on two fronts

Against Michael Taylor’s ever-changing sky, John Dove’s production is too reliant on the inherent nobility and tragic waste of the man in uniform. Rather than truly making us bleed for the characters presented, it tugs at our sadness of the abstract idea. These soldiers are too often manikins stilly representing a generation.

Accidentally empathetic

What Chris Goode has achieved is a story with so much to say that you needn’t notice quite how spectacularly well he’s saying it. With such gentle efficiency, heartfelt charm and modest deference, Goode could has all the makings of a ‘freelance social interventionist’ himself.

It all seems so distant

The aim, of course, is to reveal the pretence involved, but the trouble is that the simulated party never abandons its own fakeness. It feels too choreographed to become infectiously real. Its wildness seems too forced; its recklessness, too stage-managed; its ebb and flow, too inorganic.

Perplexity in perpetuity

There is a definite debt to Pinter at work, as the kindness of strangers is subverted into a menace of unknown motives. Yet, it is Pinter as wrenched out of orbit by the strength of its surrealism, which prevents the addition of its elements.

The slight peevishness of librarians

The piece makes a virtue of its simplicity, simultaneously conjuring a plethora of individual understandings about the time of your life and a universal desire to share it with another. Not necessarily The Other, nor any old other, but an other somewhere in between.

Intelligibility over intelligence

Like the citrus trees that sprout through the wooden stage, nature punctures performance and an unexpected maturity, even nobility, comes to fruition.

A whirlpool of anyways

In effect, Haynes is apologising for theatre – even art as a whole – and, more specifically, for its failure to reflect a recognisable reality with any truth. Life, he demonstrates, is not neatly packagable into an hour-long studio-based piece or any other tidy, traditional medium.

Chest-puffing aggression

The majority of the forty minutes is taken up with the tension-building and legend-forging that allows Stenhouse to stand handlebar to handlebar with Knievel. Gemma Paintin, clad in a star-spangled dress, plays commentator – cycling through a history of ‘heeee-did-it’s in a musical American accent – and partner, both professional and romantic.

Tribute to a fading England

Inspired by the insolvency of MG Rover of 2005 and the subsequent dissolution of the Longbridge car manufacturing plant in Birmingham, Stan’s Cafe mourn a past more honest, more human, before community was surpassed by communication.

The female eunuch castrates herself

Even after half of her audience has left at her behest Young continues in the same vein. There is no reward for sticking with her, only more of the same aggro-feminism. Solo is uncomfortable and challenging viewing that hits all sorts of targets with unswervingly accuracy and power, but one can’t help but think that there must be another way.

Period clothing and periwigs

It’s all, like, well fucking confrontational, yeah? Only constant confrontation becomes, at best, tiresome and tedious. The main problem – and there are many – is that Ann Liv Young’s form is so noisy it drowns out any possibility of genuine content. Her work is so nihilistic that it is devoid even of nihilism.

Personal shambles

Though the programme notes protest otherwise, Panic is not about the satyric divinity Pan. Rather, it is about McDermot himself. Indeed, he is on such personal and confessional form that you almost feel bound by audience-patient confidentially.

Breakdown Britain

Beyond intermittent powercuts and miner musicians, Rice largely assumes our understanding of the historical connotations, focussing instead on general atmosphere and aesthetic. Here, the winter of discontent – its collective anger and will-power – is reduced to mere picket chic.

He wears a showman’s hat

Neilson gets too clever in revealing a second layer of reality. As Gant’s show collapses in mutiny, it undermines itself. The supposedly real seems all the more false with its scripted spontaneity and assurances that this has never happened before.

From municipal trapezes to breathless sleep

From the very first image – a field of horizontal bodies hanging from butchers’ hooks as if a human battery farm – Tabú’s component parts demand interpretation rather than astonished applause.

A grand piano burns

As he snaps us with a Polaroid and enacts birth, pointing upwards with the accusatory finger of Death, Andy Warhol seems the recurring surveyor of this Inferno; an anthropologist of Hell.

Cutesy exteriors

Burkett channel-hops between cartoon voices to conduct conversations with himself and litters a sweet story with camp asides. Perhaps this is intentional. It certainly fits with the puppet Twinkle’s dilemma between high art and lowly entertainment: whether t’is nobler to present puppet Shakespeare or striptease.

Only the fitful survive

In Eisler’s obsessive compulsive clown there is a satisfying mix of Hitchcock, Pinter and Woody Allen with a nod to the two soups of Julie Walters thrown in for good measure. Her ceremonial laying of the table so as to stave off apocalypse verges of comic genius.

Stuck limpet-like to the past

The combination of Walsh’s expressionistic text and the gentle disco glisten of Sabine Dargent’s industrial design creates a dream-like quality that muddles with the strangely concrete setting. It is a real world, albeit one that seems controlled by a Beckettian puppet-master: sunsets fast-forward, time dissolves, nothing much happens.

Mixology of masculinity

There are flashes of real wit and invention in the choreography; not least in the charmingly performed duet between Carl Harrison and a tent.

A painted smile where gritted teeth should be

Conal Morrison’s stubborn intent that we should enjoy ourselves, which results in a flurry of pratfalls, comedy accents and innuendo so thick that it has become opaque, leaves the RSC’s latest Taming of the Shrew looking like a children’s entertainer at a funeral

From puppet to awkward humanoid

If certain tricks, such as paper birds and human trees, seem as familiar as the picturesque vision of a pre-Western Japan, they don’t yet feel totally exhausted. Yet the convention-busting discovery that first brought such elements into Complicité’s work seems absent here

Tel Aviv Tangle

A new play about the Palestini-Israeli conflict brims with glimpsed details ignored by international journalism and a fuzzy sense of the everyday existence.

Dropped balls

While there is a laudable sense of human fallibility about Schwietzke’s acceptance of dropped balls, it leaves very little at stake.

The glorious striptease of the Jewish mother

As a traditional Jewish wedding encroaches on the daily life of an unspecified Eastern European village, a string of mishaps occur. Rings are misplaced and domestic arguments explode, invitations are scattered and bride and groom seem to keep missing one another.

A line-up of the loopy

Antrobius’ play examines a group of voluntarily institutionalised inmates under the inactive observation of Dr Parks. In amongst the ragbag collection of ticks and crocks are the youthfully antagonistic David , the coy masochist Juliet and Carter, a suicidal forty-something bouncing between prim etiquette and blind inappropriateness.

The fatal inevitability of repercussions and conscience

Seeking Oedipus is a bold and brilliant piece of theatre, caught between traditions of Ancient Greece, Marcel Marceau and Pina Bausch. It delights the eyes and rouses the feelings in a way that everyday life is unable to do.

Butter would freeze over

Essentially, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea is a series of pop-gothic vignettes, akin to Improbable’s Shockheaded Peter, telling of faceless tooth-fairies and gingerbread revolutionaries.

A pas de deux between performer and light

Dispensing with the usual rules of narrative, character and interaction, Fevered Sleep has created something altogether more responsive and gloriously freeform. It borders on live art; almost post-dramatic theatre for pre-schoolers

Between Beckett and Hannah-Barbera

Like the characters, Mungu’s production takes a long while to get off the ground, but having finally taken off, it soars. The metal structures form a swinging cockpit-like contraption, equipped with an industrial fan and four black-clad stagehands, and the two seem to genuinely take flight.

A warm bath, run by another

Lucy Ellinson and Chris Thorpe perform with dazzling openness – utterly convincing as characters yet also allowing something of themselves to slip through. Whether playing with finely-tuned details or broad comedy, they remain engaging, empathetic and extremely likeable.

Low-tech, low-brow and lowly

Footsbarn’s Dream might serve as an easy introduction for the uninitiated, but in harking back to a time before directorial vision and literary interpretation it offers little more than a glimpse of curious antiquity.

Reputation, reputation, reputation

What the production loses is a sense of tragic downfall, as Jimmy Akingbola’s Othello is only great when viewed from within the culture under attack. He is a picture of hostile masculinity elevated from a pack of dopey shellsuited henchmen, too easily coaxed into irrational suspicion.

Blind luck and bluff

Though Massey’s script is full of deliciously bleak witticisms, waxing lyrical on phone sex lines and Aldi, it is ultimately contained by its own linearity. His delicate build of tension in the first half is entirely undermined by the predictability of the outcome.

Admirably and hopelessly idealistic

Tony Graham’s lushly atmospheric production treats its young audience without patronising them, conjuring up a delicate exoticism through suspended rugs and the sway of Tunde Jegede’s music.

Clashing worldviews

Where the message is left to the words and movements of a talented performer, DV8 create something special and, more importantly, human.

Ill-conceived drama

Essentially, Garnett’s script consists of little more than a series of sleepless nights undermined by a clunky attempt to up the stakes and inject contemporary relevance.

Theatrical cannabis

The beauty in all this is not so much in these narrative plots as in the concepts whizzing around them and their pitch-perfect, rhythmic realisation under Simon McBurney’s direction.

The crafty illusion of danger

What a joy to see an audience turned topsy-turvy in its ogling of Ursula Martinez’s playful striptease when she coaxes a final empowering red hanky from her naked person.

Unshaken and unstirred

Spyski (or The Importance of Being Honest) – a potentially lethal concoction of espionage thriller and Oscar Wilde – has the hit ratio of an anonymous henchman.

The show must glow on

What really comes to the fore here is atmosphere. More than simply broken, the space is a wilderness of peeling paint and exposed wires. Yet there is a magic within: from shelves overhead, a hoard of desk lights peer down on us like nymphs.

Playground flirtation

There are hints of classical epic theatre at play here as well, with Annemarie Haas and a delightfully melancholic Ponsioen overseeing proceedings as the celestial bodies, offering up an opulent musical score making Perô as pleasing on the ear as the eye.

Celebrating and berating

Awst and Walther enact their demolition with ponderous deliberation and protracted curiosity, forgetting about the audience along the way; the diminishing numbers testifying to the long stretches of boredom.

Kebab nation

Poles and pole-dancers, pissheads and pets threaten one another, raise their fists and fight for territorial control, while community support officers, Mary and Charlie, bumble love-struck through their patrol like cheery ramblers in a National Park.

Physical theatre

Jon Spooner’s supposition – following a throwaway remark by his collaborator Professor Vlatko Verdal – is that quantum physics is not difficult stuff. In his hands, thanks to careful and patient elucidation, its principles straighten out into clarity.