Alongside its fast cars, dizzying theatrical devices and pounding beats, Common Wealth's Peaceophobia counters prejudice with stories of humour, passion, and belief. Read our full review here. Photo: Ian Hodgson Dykegeist @ Summerhall (★★★★) But at the 4th March performance, at least, the duologue elements did work as short plays, performed well by the volunteer actors from the audience – at times, so convincingly that they could have been stooges. It’s tempting, however, to think that it would have been even better with a more standard casting of regular actors, performing each piece as ‘straight’ theatre.

I do carry a notepad around. I think that’s a writer’s prerogative! But really all my best inspiration happens when I’m walking around and reading. I also find a lot of inspiration in seeing other people’s work – it’s incredibly helpful to spend time thinking about what I like and don’t like in other people’s art to try to hone my own craft. I find it particularly helpful to see theatre I don’t like very much; I’ve had some of my most exciting ideas while incredibly bored in an audience. Hopefully some writers will come and hate my play and write something brilliant as a result! Temping is a jewel-like show, elegantly paced with a constant flow of ‘work’, and, of course, slowly dawning revelations about office life, unexpected relationships, petty squabbles. But behind the mundane trivia of work lurk real lives and hopes – too easily snuffed out by your own complicity, and even by murkier activities that are only hinted at. There’s a limit to how far Dutch Kills can go before shattering the illusion they’ve so carefully created, so in many ways Temping is full of ideas that could be far more fully developed in an alternative format. Nonetheless, it’s a quietly moving, slightly unsettling, miniature masterpiece of a show. The show nearly gets to some interesting points about zero hour contracts, but never really arrives at the point of saying something truly impactful. Perhaps if an Uber or Deliveroo driver was in the audience, and allowed to relate their experiences, there could be some more interesting results. But ultimately, the script is Big Brother, and we have to follow our instructions.Nathan Ellis is a writer for stage and screen. In 2020 his play Super High Resolution was shortlisted for the Verity Bargate Award run by the Soho Theatre, coming in the top six out of 1500 submitted plays. His plays include No One Is Coming to Save You (a 'blazing debut' (the Guardian), published by Oberon) and work.txt (**** the Guardian). In 2021, he made Still Life, a digital play series commissioned by Nottingham Playhouse. He has TV projects in development with Greenacre Films and Balloon Entertainment. He is represented by Giles Smart at United Agents and is based between London and Berlin. The artist clearly knows what she’s doing, this isn’t performative or dancelike – she’s building a house. With I Am From Reykjavik, Sonia Hughes manages to be at once open and closed, serene and defiant. Read our full review here. Photo: Solomon Hughes There was a clear hierarchical structure to the performance: the chat function told us all what to do, and we did it. What was disturbing about the show was that the degree of agency I had been granted, though greater than what one is used to accepting as an audience member, made me all the more aware that I possessed no ability to be a ‘mortal danger’ to the structure in which I was participating – in other words – to change anything. I imagine there were others who did not feel this, who enjoyed work.txt as an explorative piece in which they had agency, in which they had chosen their work and felt its immediate visibility. I think this would also be a productive way to experience it.

An adaptation of Ellis’s recent show work.txt, it mixes existential soul-searching with wry comedy, tempered by the quiet cry of a world yearning to reinvent itself. Emily Davis is a producer of theatre and live events. She is producer at Farnham Maltings and associate producer with Poltergeist Theatre who were named in the Guardian's 'best young theatre companies'. Recent credits include Ghost Walk by Poltergeist Theatre starring Juliet Stevenson and Paterson Joseph, work.txt and work.txt online, and i will still be whole (when you rip me in half) by Ava Wong Davies (**** The Stage). Both types of writing are amazingly difficult to get right, but in different ways. Screenplays respond much better to fast plots and to visual language. Very basically, scenes are much longer in plays, and characters have to return more often, so they all need to be intensely distilled. But it’s also true that the basics of good dramatic writing carry across into screenwriting. Look at Me Don’t Look At Me tells the story of a fierce, courageous woman, and asks questions about how we tell the stories of women from history. Read our full review. Photo: Sebastian Hinds

Work demands focus. It demands being at the right place, at the right time, wearing the right clothes, being in the right mindset. It feels like it’s really hard to do good work at a time of persistent strangeness and wrongness and uncertainty, when the structures that bring us together have been worn away. And the same is true of watching a performance. work.txt is a reminder of all the work we never needed to do, and all the other more important work that’s been left undone. And that feels extra-poignant now, as so many people realise that their working lives have meant – essentially – devoting years to climbing a tall and spindly tree, one that came toppling to the ground one night in March. You knew it was precarious, but not that its roots were so shallow. Writing for theatre isn’t actually so solitary. I spend a lot of time on my own, but the actual writing time is quite limited – you could get up tomorrow and retype every word I’ve ever written and you would be done by teatime. It’s a complete joy working out solutions to problems on your own and imagining how what you’re doing might end up onstage, but you always have in your mind that eventually it will be in a room with other people – that’s why being a playwright is the best job in the world in my opinion. Not simply a tale of despair, but a space where the depth of lived experiences surrounding abortion can be felt in their entirety through storytelling combined with years’ worth of recorded Zoom interviews. Read our full review here. Photo: Chalk Line Theatre These vignettes are bizarre and abstract, and whether dancing or prowling, they flow effortlessly between creepy, funny, erotic, and playful, bouncing off the energy of the audience and the excellent soundscapes. Read our full review here. Photo: Anne Tetzlaff

Writer Nathan Ellis is a member of the BBC Drama Room and has several television projects in development. On stage he is known for his debut No One Is Coming to Save You as well as the critically acclaimed work.txt – a play without actors. Now under the direction of Blanche McIntyre, Soho Theatre will present the world premiere of Super High Resolution. The play, which focuses on the NHS, was shortlisted for the prestigious Verity Bargate Award, the judging panel of which included Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Ellis took time out to speak with us about his latest theatrical offering. It’s brilliantly executed and I look forward to reading people’s reactions to it online. After all it is a show about community. You actively want to come away and debrief with someone, to ask each other questions about the show, remember moments of genuine surprise and spontaneity. The title does it a disservice. Don’t be put off by it. It makes perfect sense when you’ve seen the show, but it doesn’t capture the incredibly joyous and fun experience on offer. Do you think theatre is in a good place currently? What, if anything, do you think is missing from the art form? Acting on stage can provide an immediate response to your work as the audience applaud – writing is a far more isolated endeavour. Do you find solace in that, or do you yearn for collaboration, either during the writing process or when it gets to the rehearsal room? Since the start of the pandemic people have been feeling more disconnected, unsure of what to do, how to behave, and how to do small talk, so it is a relief to form a group with strangers without the pressure of actually having to invent anything. Unlike awkward audience participation where one has to improvise, here you can hide behind the lines that are already written for you.

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You’re currently developing some projects for TV and you are part of the BBC Drama Room. How differently do you approach a screenplay to a stage play? By the time I read Graeber’s article, I’d already had this made pretty clear to me by work.txt, a performance which was on a surface level, and I think on its deepest level too, against this. But the way it operated was almost a mimicry of the ruling class position: it was a play in which I had no time on my hands in which to really consider exercising my autonomy. I felt like my job as an audience member-participant was of replication, not of creation – not even ancillary but arbitrary. In participating you become extremely aware of yourself as a maker of the world you inhabit, but you are not quite sure what this is in service of. In A Fairie Tale, Niall Moorjani seamlessly blends the threads of racial identity, queerness and folklore to create a fantastical and poignant picture of modern Scotland. Read the full review here. Photo: Niall Moorjani