This is how I came to arrive outside The Arcola: breathless, tipsy and exactly 11 minutes late for the performance. I was hurriedly directed to a small gathering of latecomers. After hyperventilating my way through some obligatory travel-related small talk, I was ushered with the others into the wings. In hushed tones the group was informed we were to enter as part of the actor’s carnival procession. I felt somewhat ill prepared but enthusiastic nonetheless. A few cue cards, a tambourine and I would have been ready to make my Arcola acting debut. Perhaps they would allow me to emerge from the doctor’s eponymous Cabinet to the astonishment of my more punctual friends? No such luck. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a new play inspired by the 1920’s cult film of the same name. It follows the story of Franzis Gruber (Joseph Kloska), a lowly bureaucrat, whose unremarkable existence is taken on a ghostly detour the day a peculiar fair comes to town. Within the intimate confines of the Arcola’s second studio, shadows dance across the brickwork. The enraptured audience are treated to the spectacle of a creepy, yet compact, carnival. Appropriately given the fairground setting the company...

Waking up from a less than tranquil night exploring the nooks and crannies of Edinburgh I check my schedule; letting out a morose groan that has nothing to do with my rather delicate condition. “A tribute to 2,500 years of oration” in an hour and a half; impressive given the apparent amount of content. I stumble unprofessionally into the venue, an ornate lecture room situated in Summerhall. Taking an unsteady seat on the wooden pews I’m momentarily haunted by the ghosts of fresher weeks past. Cursing my lack of paracetamol I silently plead for this to be a relatively painless ninety minutes. My fears are far from assuaged when subtitles appear above the dimly lit figure, standing before a bank of microphones. A projected blackboard lists the historical speakers to be quoted; the lecture hall is revealing itself to be a depressingly appropriate setting for this “performance”. And then he started singing Smells like Teen Spirit. I honestly couldn’t say how we got to this point. In fact I believe the majority of the audience would have a hard time recalling the journey to this surreal development. Fluent in four different languages, performer Dhaenens fashions a multilingual maelstrom of...

The house-lights dim, the sound dies. The stage is dark, an utter blackout, and then the silence is shattered. Literally. An invisible rainfall commences; shards of glass cascade then crash to the floor. The performance begins. Caesarean Section: Essays on Suicide, marks my most recent foray into the fearsome world of physical theatre. It is a piece composed of seductive harmonies and visceral dissonance, exploring suicide through razor sharp choreography. Journeying to a much murkier part of the human psyche, Caesarean is theatre with a cutting edge. A deep channel slices down the centre of the stage, brimming with shimmering shards of glass. It is a sparkling river of slivers, all fragments from past performances. This line illustrates the theoretical knife point upon which the piece delicately pivots. Swelling harmonies build to inexorable crescendos as musical expressions of the characters’ powerful death-drives. It is only the moments of explosive discord that jar the characters back from the edge. This key contrast is penetratingly poignant; the dangerous allure of demise is exquisitely depicted. Nearing the close of the performance the audience is plunged once more into darkness, and silence holds sway once more. Slowly, from all sides of the black...

Having only seen a few Frantic Assembly shows (famous veterans of the form), and gained a sprain from my last attempt at a straddle jump, I feel pretty ill-equipped to critique physical theatre. With a tragic lack of backflips present in my day-to-day life I have no qualms in accepting the role of an observant amateur. From this low vantage point the art form at its best always seems graceful, often beautiful and regularly distant. The performers are frequently absorbed in their story to the extent that there scarcely appears room for us. The dexterous displays can appear almost ethereal and therefore somewhat removed. This could not be further from the truth with The Static, a physical display guaranteed to leave you buzzing. The narrative begins slowly. The initial dialogues occasionally give way to bouts of storytelling, fleshing out the world of the play. As the end of the second act looms the piece subtly mutates: movement becomes more striking, the colours brighter. Dynamic elements of multimedia and extended physicality seep into the performance: someone, somewhere, is gradually turning up a voltage dial. In its finest moment The Static shows us an expression of two teenagers’ first kiss. The...