The heats are on! Swing by Udderbelly at the Southbank Centre if you like a little circus in your summer – whenever summer decides to arrive – because Circus Maximus, the UK’s first circus competition, has landed.

Some of the country’s finest circus talents compete in the iconic purple Udderbelly for the votes of the audience and judges. Over the course of the next month, 20 acts will compete in Circus Maximus for the grand prize of £5,000 and the opportunity to develop a new show with Underbelly Productions and Circus Space – on of the UK’s foremost centres for circus arts. I attended the second part of the first heat which featured four rounds, one for each act, the heat lasting for an hour in total. The acts were delightful and diverse. Firstly there was juggling and unicycling followed by hula hoops, then strength handstands and dance, then trapeze, and finally aerial hoop.

Tweed-suited Sam Goldburn’s act set the sweet charm of a Chaplin-esque, face-pulling juggler and unicycle trickster to a contemporary bass line, and it worked a treat. This is a man who can juggle balls with his feet and unicycle with one leg. The second act featured Sylvia Pavone with several sparkly hula hoops, with which she managed to create a swirling light show and perform tricks that made the hoops appear stationary, even as they rotated around her arms. It was a good few seconds before I realised they were spinning.

The third act was my favourite: this was Jonathan Finch’s Danse Macabre. With a set of balancing poles at waist height he performed a movement piece of tremendous strength where the focus was on the body alone; the emotion he got across in the act was what I found particularly stunning and moving to behold. I won’t lie, Finch got my vote. Alcina Mendes approached her trapeze act from an interesting angle. She played a character, Maria the Cleaner, and created her own little scene in which she came blundering through the audience onto the stage, ranting about everything being a mess, her goal being to clean the trapeze with her spray and wash gloves. A lot of her movements and tricks on the trapeze were pulled off as if by accident. You know a person excels at their skill when they play the casual card.

And finally there was graceful Gemma Creasey on the aerial hoop, which ended with a terrifying (and deliberate) face-first drop to the floor that had the people next to me clutching their hair.

Sylvia Pavone won the heat, but all the acts were so watchable and so different that I almost felt mean by voting. Circus Maximus is definitely worth checking out: the talents and spectacles are surely only going to get more impressive as the heats go on.

The remaining heats of Circus Maximus run from May 14-19, and the finals run from May 28-June 1. For more information and tickets, visit the Underbelly website.

Finlay Robertson’s debut play Strong Arm takes a look at Roland Poland, a 20 stone young man, as he takes on the mental and physical challenge of changing his body from fat man to bodybuilder. A somewhat comic, somewhat tragic, look at the desires and punishment that bodybuilders put themselves through, Robertson’s play is as powerful as it is gruesome. Playing the role of Roland himself, Robertson performs with heart and candour, taking his audience through his life of protein shakes and his morphing body.

Strong Arm is at first difficult to get into – there’s something about Robertson’s writing that takes time to sink in – but once you join him on his protein diet and pumping guns of steel, you can’t help but be won over. Underlying this story of fat boy to steel man is the terrifying side effects and conditions that bodybuilders put themselves through. From blood in the urine to uncontrollable sexual discharge, the body is destroyed before it is repaired, muscle after muscle. Strong Arm acts, at times, as a lesson for those of us not pumping away at the gym – to gain muscle we must tear fibres and rebuild, again and again, putting our body under stress and causing both physical and mental strain.

Where Strong Arm works is in its ability to make the audience unsure whether to laugh or be serious. The thin line that Roberton’s writing treads makes for this uncertainty, and as the character of Roland gets caught in the routine of gym – eat, wank, sleep, gym, eat, wank, sleep – the darker side of the muscle-building world is revealed. To feel pain is to be achieving, and to achieve you must be in pain.

Roland’s story spans the length of the childhood torment of being overweight to the mental drive of becoming someone else altogether. It’s a compelling, strange but strong production that demonstrates Robertson’s ability both as a performer and as a playwright. It feels as if Strong Arm is somewhat of a challenge too – with Robertson being of average build yet having to vent this anger and attempt to emulate the qualities of a body builder (especially at the end during a Mr Britain contest, complete with speedos), it is a brave performance. It doesn’t completely blow you away, but it does leave you wondering whether joining a gym to get rid of puppy fat would actually lead to harming your body more. A small note of caution by Robertson is given: to change your body is to change your very self or being. Are you prepared for that?

**** – 4/5 stars

Strong Arm is playing at Underbelly as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival until 26 August. For more information and tickets, see the Edinburgh Fringe website.

Luke Barnes is certainly proving that his writing talent is on top form at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival. He has two plays running: the first is the fantastic Bottleneck presented by HighTide Festival and the second is the equally engrossing Chapel Street as part of the Old Vic New Voices Edinburgh Season and presented by SCRAWL. Joe, a twenty-five year old unemployed lad, is ready for a night on the town, whilst Kirsty, a fourteen year old school girl, is preparing for a night out with the girls to celebrate her friend’s birthday. Joe dreams of the next pussy to get into, whilst Kirsty dreams of getting noticed and going to university. They couldn’t be more apart – that is until they meet on a Friday night on Chapel Street.

Full of humourous stories and anecdotes of youthful life, Chapel Street presents two young things with different outlooks on life trying to have fun. Full of sparky energy and lovable characters, you can’t help but enjoy the ride that Barnes takes you on. Cary Crankson as the boyish Joe and Ria Zmitrowicz as Kirsty are superb at relaying their stories, their lines interjecting across each other as they steadily get more drunk and seek the opposite sex to play with. Only it’s not all about showing the drunken stumbles of boy and girl – there’s a strong message from Barnes on staying true to who you are and what you believe in.

Many plays at the moment depict the down-and-out youth of today as they have doors slammed in their faces, and whilst there is an element of this in the character of Joe, it is Kirsty who prevails against all the crap that is thrown at her. It doesn’t matter that her teachers want her to fail or the guidance counciler thinks nursing would suit her better than psychology – by the end of Chapel Street anything is possible. Barnes wraps this all nicely within the snappy dialogue that bounces between Joe and Kirsty as they each tell their stories, the two interlocking and mixing with the vomit and sex and everything in between, becoming one giant mishmash of youthfulness. Barnes text is particularly sharp and under the direction of Cheryl Gallagher Chapel Street packs a punch.

There is something within Crankson’s and Zmitrowicz’s performances that make them engrossing to watch. We get caught within their stories, and whilst we might feel repulsed by Crankson’s Joe or feel sorry for the slightly dim Kirsty, the characters are compelling. In Bottleneck Barnes proved that he could write with poise and poignancy, in Chapel Street he shows his wit and humour. If anything is clear, Barnes is a young playwright bursting with talent and as a co-founder of SCRAWL, we might just start seeing more of his writing and youthfulness popping up. Don’t miss it.

**** – 4/5 stars

Chapel Street is playing at Underbelly as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival until 27August. For more information and tickets, see the Edinburgh Fringe website.

The title Captain Ko and the Planet of Rice in all its kooky glory may have you envisioning barmy Mighty Boosh-style spectacles of all things random, off-the-wall and altogether rather trippy. And to be honest, you would be partly right. Aliens waltzing with grannies, the discovery of a teapot on a space exploration and a starring role for the humble rice grain are all part and parcel of this innovative thingamajig of theatre that I am unsure whether to call a play, comedy, moving picture, experiment or something else altogether. Yet, beyond this wacky exterior, Captain Ko and the Planet of Rice is a touching and ingeniously clever portrait of the complexities and collapse of time, memory and space.

A triptych of three separate stories that neatly morph together the scientific and the artistic, Dancing Brick show us that in Captain Ko  this is the world, life and time – but not as we know it. In the first chapter, Captain Ko and Admiral Al Stark in their powder blue space suits enact what must surely be the dream vision of any 1970s Star Wars zealot kid who even today harbours a secret obsession with aliens and space rockets.

The gaudy cinematic future then seamlessly gives way to the nostalgically dusty past as Valentina Ceschi begins the second silent story. In an entrancing twenty minute mime, an elderly woman brews a cup of tea to pass the day in an act that quickly becomes ritual. Acquiring greater weirdness and confusion as the pots and plates stack up in this tea-drinking Endgame, this was a genuinely moving scene that explored the repetition, trappings and dream-like distance of neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Dementia.

This lapse of time then melts into the final part of the triptych, where cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev (played by Thomas Eccleshare) experiences the surreal nature of what we call our own time and place when he returns from a space expedition to find the Soviet regime has collapsed.  Merging the political with the intangibly temporal, this is perhaps the most dramatic and understandable of the three stories, the others of which can sometimes move towards an almost Joyceian level of confusion and misunderstanding.

Yet Captain Ko and the Planet of Rice, while understandably alienating to some, is nonetheless a poetic and beautiful work that taps into one of the most sensitive and unpredictable of human faculties – time and memory – in a way that is challenging, unusual and wonderfully inspiring. This is a pioneering work for our age that is a real privilege to witness.

*****- 5/5 stars

Captain and Ko and the Planet of Rice is at Underbelly until August 26 as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. For more information and tickets see the Edinburgh Fringe website.