Bull - a bleak tale of three office workers awaiting the arrival of the big boss. Two of them taunt, harass and bully the third, revealing to him that the meeting is to choose which of them the company will "let go".  He, who can least afford to lose his job, duly gets the push and they are even nastier to him.  The curtain falls on the play and on his life.  A competent production of an unsettling story which shows that man's inhumanity to man is not limited to the torture chamber or the battlefield.

Level Up - Jimmy want to marry Natasha but in the brave new world in which the play is set that cannot be because the state does not sanction marriage between high scoring individuals like her and humble drones like him.  Jimmy determines to raise himself up to the necessary level and in the process shafts his brother and his best friend and fails to realise that he is destroying all that Natasha found loveable in him.  Engaging performances from the cast of five and an ending if not quite happy then optimistic.

After the Fall: Crisis, Recovery and the Making of a New Spain - the author, Tobias Buck, was the FT's correspondent in Spain for a number of years.  This book is the result and its presentation kicked off my Book Festival programme.  Buck traced concisely and knowledgeably the course of recent Spanish history through the building boom, the financial crisis, the Catalonian secession attempt and the current state of the parties. On my list but by the time I get around to reading it Spain will have moved on.

Wine and Words - subtitled A Taste of Basque Culture this Book Festival event was in essence a wine-tasting.  Some music was played and poetry read.  The music was folksy and  the poetry in Basque (though subsequently translated) and the wine was Rioja. Pleasant but not riveting.   

Kalakuta Republik - an EIF dance show which I ultimately enjoyed once I'd decided that there was no good reason to worry about finding meaning in the show (or not) than there had been at the acrobatic circus a few days previously.  I was wrong of course about lack of meaning.  The EIF blurb tells us "...dance becomes a symbol of transformation, a ceaseless march towards ultimate freedom.  Kalakuta Republik is a carnival of insurrection."   I saw it as a colourful, noisy, celebratory feast of rhythmic joy.  Should have bought a programme.