★★★★☆ Biscuit Land of the title is neither a real place, nor a fantasy setting. Performer Jess Thom says the word “biscuit” thousands of times a day. After watching the show, Biscuit Land feels like a perspective, an approach – Thom letting us see things her way. It’s an angle of unrestrained creativity.

Heads Will Roll brings together a South American jungle exploration conducted by a Spanish conquistador, a modern-day classroom, El Dorado the myth, and “El Dorado” the short-lived BBC soap opera. Experimental and tangential, the show’s thematic problem is almost covered by its charming delivery, but its whiplash style means that narrative cohesion becomes beyond reach.

Nearly fifty years after Enoch Powell delivered what he referred to as his Birmingham speech – what most of us know as the “Rivers of Blood” speech – Ian McDiarmid takes the stage of the Birmingham Repertory to recite it. That the high point of What Shadows is this recitation demonstrates the longstanding power some words hold, and betrays how this production struggles to respond to them . . . The message? At best it was confused. Finding ways to communicate across great divides is important, of course . . .

The production does not shy away from allusions, overtones, and indeed explicit realisations of the perverse violations that face (and may have previously faced) Regan. Claire Louise Connolly inhabits the character well, her few scenes before the possession giving Regan dimensionality. She seems like a child who is mature for her age, but never an adult playing a child . . . Its subject material is bleak and complex, and it cleverly leans into that, rather than away from it.

A shipping container sits in Centenary Square. Inside there are two rows of worn red velvet seats, like those you might imagine in an old cinema, allowing for an audience of 15 or thereabouts. They surround a table covered in cloth. The audience sits down, and puts on headsets. The lights dim, and then switch off. Séance begins. Total darkness, 3D stereo sound, and actual tactile experience combines in this production to unsettle, frighten and potentially upset the audience, and the show is calibrated as such that it is difficult to maintain your composure.