Theatre 503, a small stage above the Latchmere pub on Battersea Park Road, has a reputation for staging provocative new writing. Led since 2006 by Artistic Directors Tim Roseman, who left the theatre in September of this year, and Paul Robinson, the theatre’s most notable success has been The Mountaintop written by Katori Hall, a fictional depiction of Martin Luther King’s last hours which transferred to the West End and won an Olivier Award for Best New play in 2010. Theatre 503 certainly has no qualms about pushing boundaries, staging shows like Porn: The Musical and Take Two Every Four Hours which discusses terminal illness, and allowing first-time writers space and freedom to experiment.

Papercut Theatre’s XY falls within this long tradition of original, challenging new plays. Four authors were chosen to write a short play for three actors, without denoting the gender of their characters, and six directors were selected to stage one of the plays as they saw fit. The sequence opens with Tobias Wright’s Spineless which explores when office politics gets nasty and sexual harassment accusations get used as a bargaining tool. It’s an entertaining opener, although Director Bruce Adams makes the gender-play is too obvious by casting the oppressive boss as a stereotypical bossy career-woman, and the quality of acting is poor, with the exception of Daniel Ward as the unfortunate employee.

The next offerings, Sara Pascoe’s The Endings and German Munoz’s Hopelessly Devoted to You, are the two which are repeated in the second half under another director. This introduces an interesting tension between writing and directing, although the differences are so subtle that I feel more freedom or more imagination on the part of the directors would have produced greater engagement and significance. Unfortunately, such repetition with very little variation suggested comparison between the competence of the actors more than anything else, creating a competition in which the far stronger performances in Director Rebecca Manson Jones’ The Endings and Director Amanda Castro’ Hopelessly Devoted to You stood out.

Discussing fetishes about disabilities and wheelchair users, Hopelessly Devoted to You brings up unusual, contemporary issues about acceptance and relationships, while The Endings is a wonderfully absurd tale of three kids, Biggy, Normal and Tiny who live in a strange world inhabited by the violent Egg and mysterious Spoon. These two nicely discuss the issue of gender; the category of male or female seems unimportant and ambiguous in the characters of Biggy, Normal and Tiny, while the two versions of Hopelessly Devoted to You make an important point by comparing the relationship between two lesbians and a straight couple and challenging how this changes our perceptions of the situation. The points raised here are fascinating, but ultimately cannot make up for the variable quality of acting and the tediousness of repeating two very similar versions of two plays. If you’re a huge fan of Groundhog Day, you’ll love it. If not, stay well away.

XY was at Theatre 503 on 9 and 10 December 2012. For more information visit the Papercut Theatre website.

Science fiction rarely treads the boards, with the exception of a certain Spiderman musical, which ended in disaster with four major accidents. So Misshapen Theatre’s Blast Off at the Soho Theatre is a welcome change. Luckily without any webs and spiders.

Blast Off is a collection of short theatre pieces written by various upcoming writing talents in London. The show opens with A Live Presentation by Dr Rothstatter on S.S.O.M.C.A.T written by Gabriel Bisset-Smith, and is a sketch with hypnotists on how they can affect people’s minds. The sketch is directed at the audience and a girl is picked out from the seats as a volunteer – an actor, of course – and the madness commences as actress Ursula Early is made to pretend to be chicken, Hamlet, to speak French, weep, sing and end as an evil spirit. Early is hilarious and full of energy and, together with Matt Spencer who plays the painfully geeky Simon Smith, they redirect the sketch from a bit of dusty acting and playing for laughs into something that is actually genuinely funny.

Jon Brittain takes over and introduces the night of sci-fi with a promise of geeky encounters on stage. Jokes about the new Spider Man make the audience giggle and, despite Brittain being nervous, we are launched into the rest of the night with a hope of sci-fi humour.

The Story of the Cryogenically Frozen Humanoid and the Impending Hen Party (or the Martian Cabaret) – even the title makes you out of breath – is a bit cringy, as the actors seem to have lost faith in what they are doing. There are a few funny moments as they all cross-dress and sing about life on Mars, but the sketch is staggering between a good laugh and a high school nativity play. The rest of the short sketches continue with funny moments, but the writing is either a bit dull or clouded by rusty acting.

However, everything is forgotten as the night ends with Just the Few of Us by Sara Pascoe. A couple think they’re the last people on Earth after a virus has killed everyone. Joel (Brett Goldstein) is left with his hysterical girlfriend (Margaret Cabourne Smith) who weeps for her dying pets and their messed-up relationship. All changes when Joel’s ex-girlfriend (brilliant Cariad Lloyd) appears with the revelation that all of Joel’s ex-girlfriends are alive. Joel is left to face the horrid fact that his sperm makes his women immune to the virus and he has to save humanity from extinction. That, and living with all his exes. The writing is fast-paced, inventive and funny, and the cast do it justice and enthral the audience. No wonder this piece got the most applause.

Blast Off made a lot of promises but rarely delivered. The collection of pieces seemed more like a showcase for nervous drama school graduates launching themselves into the business, and though it had very funny moments and a Comedy Central twang, it never really lifted the roof as a whole performance. But I would gladly go back just to watch Sara Pascoe’s piece and Brett Goldstein’s frustration.

Blast Off ran at the Soho Theatre on 10 July. For information about what’s on at the Soho Theatre, visit the website.

Ipswich wouldn’t be the first place you’d call to mind when thinking about the hotbed of contemporary theatre talent that the UK is nurturing. The city might only be a short train ride from London and neighbouring cities, but for years it’s been kept off the circuit map – until PULSE Fringe Festival began its life. With the 2012 festival presenting 52 shows in 13 days across all of Ipswich its no wonder that we’re looking towards the East of England to shake up our festival calendar. PULSE is a bold, ambitious programme for Ipswich and this year’s festival has grown to include a new pop-up space, The Campsite offering micro performances in tents and camper vans. Latitude, eat your heart out.

The Campsite

Sendak Salon – Rachel Mars
As we climb into the back of the camper van named Larissa, Rachel Mars sits in a onesie, the same one from Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, and invites us to join her in a circle on children’s chairs. From here, we are invited into a therapy-style group where Sendak”s tale is read, we draw our own Wild Things representing ourselves, we eat them, and then, with tremendous amounts of bouncing and dancing we have a wild rampus, complete with mirror ball and pounding music. It’s a joyous 15minutes that brings back your childhood and ignites your heart. We end with the Sendak’s motto “We saw it. We loved it. We ate it.”

A Cure For Aging – Ira Brand
In Ira Brand’s A Cure For Aging we are invited by Brand to think of ourselves not as we are, but how we might be in years to come. A time when our bodies may have changed, our health deteriorated and our lives full of shadows from our past. It is as tragic as it is heartfelt, as we share a moment to think of our body and to offer hope about the future.

my heart is hitchhiking down peach tree street – Fergus Evans
In what can only be described as a heartwarming and intimate story of what home can mean to you, Fergus Evans invites his audience into his poetic world of tenderness. Reflecting on home, and Peach Tree Street, with anidotes of how best to avoid wild animals in the state of Georgia, my heart is hitchhiking down peach tree street is a small miracle wonder of story.

Good Boy – Joseph Mercier
Using the text and work of Jean Genet as a focus point, Joseph Mercier’s Good Boy is a hallucinogenic, emotive and stimulating performance piece. Through its episodic nature, Genet’s texts (with additional words from Felix Lane) are seductively spoken by Mercier into the darkness with only a microphone for company. Coupled with simplistic lighting by Ziggy Jacobs and music composed by Dinah Mullen, the pulsing of sound/light and text form a hypnotising experience, which stirs images of peep-hole fantasies and the loss of loved ones. These images, the pulsating desire and exciting that enimates from Mercier as a performer is captivating, but also somewhat tragic. There is a gentle moment where Mercier invites an audience member onto the stage and slowly sways with them in his arms. This sense of attachment and intimacy whilst being both detached and isolated is beautifully captured. Whilst perhaps some further choreographic work from Mercier to explore the relationship between word and body would have emphasised Genet’s images, Good Boy is a wonderfully tender performance piece, a real gem within PULSE.

Emily’s Very Sad Play or… The Woman Who Turned Into A Book – Sara Pascoe
Imagine, if you will, a woman who is consumed by the work of fiction around her. The embodiment of words manifest themselves into her physche so that everything she says is plagiarism of herself, every thought is from a story, a character or novel. This work-in-progress showing by Sara Pascoe in Emily’s Very Sad Play is quirky, a little rough and alienating whilst being seemingly clever. Pascoe’s character sits somewhere between the sublime and the mad, recounting a whirling narrative of being raped and falling pregnant by a doctor to burning the local library. Her narrative tumbles and spirals out of control at times, but equally soars. Peppered with touching antidotes and laugh out loud tangential insights into a woman who is consumed by the words and characters from books; for a work-in-progress piece it was surprisingly full and brimming with ideas, and future development will certainly bring about a slicker version. Pascoe herself seems to mersmerise her audience, both inviting us into her dreamlike world and alienating us through her rambling tales. A very curious piece indeed.

Tatty-Del Are Making It Work – tatty-del
It’s not everyday you consider the artistic relationship between two artists who collaborate in the making of art as a relationship itself. For tatty-del (Hana Tait and Natalie Clarke), the relationship has reached breaking point, and during the build up for working on their new piece, they have no choice but to seek couple’s therapy. They’re not actually a couple, but when you search the soul of another in the name of art, sleep side by side in hotels, on the road and on sofas across the country during a tour, a certain relationship is found. tatty-del explore this in their therapy and in their portrayal of previous times together, at parties, running into the sea or just the silence of each other’s company. As another work-in-progress piece, it is bursting with ideas, some more formulated than others, but the arching idea of integrating the relationship between co-creators through couple’s therapy is both revealing and giggle-inducing theatre. There is a certain charm in both Tait and Clarke’s portrayals of themselves and their working relationship, it borders on post-modern exposure and persona-filled idiocy,but this is revealing of a bigger strength in their performance making.

Some Thoughts On PULSE
The thing that strikes me about PULSE Fringe Festival is how it manages to bring a wealth of creative talent to Ipswich. The number of artists who are being represented during this festival is staggering, and I’m certain its not something that could be managed so easily in London, despite this being the place I’ve seen the majority of work performed before. Ipswich isn’t the immediate place I think of for nurturing contemporary theatre talent, but what PULSE sets out to do might just change this. It’s  not doing anything significantly different to what other festivals have done before (such as my recent trip to Sampled Festival in Cambridge), but the creative flare and excitement of cramming so much artistry into a little under two weeks that should be commended. Emma Bettridge has done a tremendious job of curating the festival. The next steps, though (and this was felt when I attended Sampled Festival, too), is for these festivals to begin to nurture and seek out an audience willing to engage with contemporary theatre in this format.

The Campsite seemed to be bursting with some of the most exciting artists currently making work, and in an environment like no other I’ve seen, in the intimate and personal enclosures of tents and camper vans. Whilst charming and whimsically presented, I do worry that the loyal audience of Ipswich just might not be ready for this sort of work. I could, of course, be wrong, but my visit to The Campsite seemed to show a lack of local audience for the work, with artists performing to other artists. It’s a shame, given the wealth of work on display. Perhaps the audiences fared better in the New Wolsey theatre and accompanying studio theatre? Either way, bringing such exciting and dynamic examples of contemporary theatre work to regional audiences needs to happen with care and consideration. I just worry that like Cambridge, Ipswich may not have responded as invitingly to the work as one would hope.

Saying that, PULSE is a hotbed of exciting talent and should be celebrated. It’s bold and adventerous, and, as with any festival bringing new work to new audiences, this relationship takes time to build. The key here is the role of the organisers to nurture this new audience for forthcoming work. Thankfully PULSE has such a strong brand (here I pop on my marketing hat), that the identity of the festival will surely be remembered in the future.

PULSE Fringe Festival is taking place in Ipswich until 9 June. For more information on events and shows, and to buy tickets see the PULSE Fringe Festival website.