Tales from the Garden - A young South African tells us in her pleasant and gentle voice of how she was brought up as a good Catholic girl, how she loved her grandmother and shared her love of plants.  As she speaks she minds a little garden and recounts how her grandmother pulled the petals off a rose and challenged her to sew them on again to illustrate how something beautiful once lost can never be restored.  At eighteen she is proud to be sent for three months to a youth conference in London  as a reward for her academic success.  The night before her return to South Africa she loses something beautiful and however hard she tries over the next several years it's gone forever and she with it.  A delicate and moving piece of theatre that deserves larger audiences than the one I was part of.

Collapsible - Aping St.Simeon the performer spends her time on a little platform atop a pillar, no doubt to stress her isolation.  She's lost her job and much of the action of the piece revolves around her fending off enquiries from friends and family as to her progress in finding another, how she is and so on.  She in turn enquires of them what word or words describe her that she can use in interviews.  They are many and various: smart, perfectionist, reliable.....I was reminded in the early moments of the play of the character in Fleabag, her brightness, false cheerfulness and so on.  I haven't seen enough of Fleabag to know how it develops but in this play the character deteriorates, collapses as in the title.  It's a very powerful and clearly draining performance that takes it out of the actress and whose sincerity shines through.  Excellent show.  There is a deus ex machina who appears at the end not so much to offer her a way out of her predicament (though he offers some comfort) as to provide a ladder for her to to get down.

The Long Pigs - I can't really bear to say much about this. I disliked it pretty intensely.  Three Australian clowns in grubby grey outfits and with black piggy noses potter about the stage constucting a heathrobinson machine that fires red noses, creating a crucifixion scene in which lumps of bread are thrown at the victim, slobbering over cream tarts and so on without the distraction of a script or a storyline.  I do them an injustice there.  The absence of one red nose is signalled early in the show and the discovery of its whereabouts heralds the final scene. Bullshit.  Or in this case pigshit.

Devil of Choice - A perfectly presentable three act drama about cheating on your wife/friend condensed into an hour.  There's a carapace involving Faust and his pact with the devil which is something to do with there always being a choice and so on.  It's very well performed.  There are lots of good lines.  There's a fine live violin soundscape. But was it worth the performers' time to bring it all the way from New York?

Hughie - I was making my way to catch the bus home when I was handed a flyer and a free ticket for this show.  Call me mean but who could resist.  Let me play my part in this almost Faustian compact by declaring that it's good and you won't regret the forty five minutes lost in watching it.  Its duration comes as something of a surprise when you learn it was written by the author of A Long Days Journey into Night.  It's a two-hander but mostly one character riffs on his relationship with the recently deceased night clerk (night porter in our English I suppose) of the down market Manhattan hotel he frequents to an audience of one - the replacement night clerk. As befits its 1920's provenance there is no swearing, a rarity in the modern Fringe.

Enough - is one of those plays where patterned, poetic writing takes precedence over actual drama.  That's not me.  That's Michael Billington.  How right he is and how much I'd like to see some actual drama!