The show starts with the cast wandering around a semi-lit stage as though testing out the sound props, but within one minute of the lights coming up you know that you are in safe hands. The four women engage with the audience with an easy professionalism and humour that puts everyone at their ease. It looks simple but requires excellent direction and much hard work. Every few minutes there is a new imaginative and amusing theatrical trick and the quick fire togetherness is always immaculate.

Tremolo Theatre’s The Hours Before We Wake is a little gem of a show, multi-faceted and polished to perfection. It begins in balletic slow-motion, with a young man swimming in dangerous waters. After evading snarling monsters he triumphantly dons a superhero cape and… wakes up. It is 2091 and almost all is well in Ian’s world . . .

Another full house at the Wardrobe sees Exeter based, Substance and Shadow Theatre, bring a follow up to their previous punk era offering, ‘Duplicity’. On this outing they turn their gaze on the 80’s skinheads. The premise of the show (no writer is credited so presumably devised) is the unremarkable one that you can’t judge a book by its cover. The ‘books’ in this case are a group of Devon based skinheads . . . Judged on previous form there is more to come from this production . . .

I am constantly (pleasantly) reminded of theatre’s ability to connect with audiences on the flimsiest of pretexts and by the same token, the willingness of audiences to be entertained on the slenderest of devices . . . Using no more than a collection of simple conceits of the sort that occupy the labours of actors at drama school and the kind of silliness that infests umpteen fringe shows the length and breadth of the land the troupe have whisked up a concoction that flirts with incomprehension at every turn