Brief encounter of the fun kind

0 This Australian perormance collective goes from strength to strength and enjoys every minute

classical musical routines, all pastel-hued top hats, tails and outsized powder puffs.

Individual numbers maintain the company’s high standards, with terrific aerial work variously incorporating hoops, cages and striptease and a neat alarm-clock-based speciality act.

There’s naughty, colourful fun in the science lab with Louis Biggs and Mark Winmill and a gloriously surreal domestic dance

routine from Harry Claytonwright as a frustrated housewife and Tomas Gundry Greenfield as a lamp ( just go with it).

Perhaps most impressive of all is the rolling crescendo of turns that brings things to a climax – a breathless success of stadium lighting, bump-and-grind backflips, spinning set-pieces and electronically illuminated hula hoops, juggling pins and bikinis. Most delicious of all

is Clayton-wright finding conspicuous pleasure in a very unexpected way – not, for once, with an eye on audience enjoyment but for what feels like the performer’s own gratification on their own terms.

And that’s the basic, and very welcome, Briefs message: showcasing selfdetermined pleasure and encouraging it in others. BEN WALTERS

Until 26 August. Tomorrow 7:15pm. Traversetheatre (Venue15) JJJJ

Post-feminist dystopias are all the rage at the moment, as angry backlash movements across the West seek to roll back the achievements of half a century of feminism.

But it was long before the television version of The Handmaid’s Tale appeared on our screens that young British playwright Penelope Skinner set out to write her major play Meek, playing at the Traverse in an intense and beautiful production by Amy Hodge for Headlong, in association with Birmingham Rep.

In some future Nordic country under authoritarian patriarchal government, Irene finds herself in prison, after someone complains to the authorities about a rebellious love song she has written, and performed in a local coffee shop.

Her god-fearing friend Anna assures her that she’ll probably be out within hours; but as time wears on, and she is transferred to a faraway northern prison, it becomes increasingly clear that – as her lawyer Gudrun feared from the outset – the authorities may be intent on flexing the muscles they have acquired through recent new legislation, and making a chilling example of her.

In the end, like a latter-day John Proctor in The Crucible, Irene faces a classic choice between recanting and apologising, or becoming a martyr in the cause of truth and freedom; and as her one great earthly love fails her, and the global fame and significance of her sacrifice begins to shake the regime, she increasingly feels she has no choice but to play out the role history has thrust upon her.

Skinner’s tensely unfolding narrative is beautifully played by Shvorne Marks as Irene, Amanda Wright as Gudrun, and Scarlett Brookes as Irene’s distraught friend Anna, far more entangled in Irene’s story than we first realise; and with a beautiful, restrained set by Max Jones and brooding sound by Melanie Wilson adding to the play’s powerful atmosphere of terror, oppression and resistance, Meek emerges as an immaculately timely play for tomorrow, full of perfectly controlled passion, anger, and foreboding.

JOYCE MCMILLAN

Until 26 August. Tomorrow 4pm.