Transform 14

West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds

4 Stars

Now in its fourth year, the Transform festival brings together a mouth-watering selection of new theatre commissions, works in progress and nationally acclaimed productions that fill every available space within the West Yorkshire Playhouse.

If the programme reflects trends within the wider theatre community then many more interactive, immersive and promenade productions can be expected over the coming months.

Falling loosely into the former category is one of the four-day festival's highlights Love Letters Straight From Your Heart by Uninvited Guests and Fuel.

A deceptively simple idea, it gathers a group of strangers and plays song dedications that have been submitted in advance.

In a room "where it's always Valentine's Day," the two hosts sit at opposite ends of a table and commence a DJ dance-off while reading out requests to lovers, daughters, deceased brothers and grandmothers.

What happens over the next 80 minutes is a revelation in undermining English reserve. There are tears and laughter over dedications that are alternately funny, intimate, poignant and united by the fact that such stories would rarely be shared in public.

If the piece creates a genuinely moving instance of shared intimacy, then Ring by Fuel is all about generating unease and suspicion within a roomful of disconnected strangers.

Wearing headphones that amplify every noise, the audience is pitched into absolute blackness before finding themselves in a Kafkaesque meeting of confession, blame and blind recognition.

This creates an unnerving deconstruction of identity and sound perception, with eyes straining to make out movement as chairs scrape and people whisper in your ear.

The senses and imagination slowly become more alert over the course of an hour, with it becoming ever harder to differentiate between what's happening in the room and what's part of the performance.

The concept of defamiliarising space through the power of suggestion is also employed in The Claim by Hannah Bruce and Company. Receiving instructions through headphones, audience members navigate their way through the hidden corners, backstage areas and dusty passageways of West Yorkshire Playhouse.

The ghosts of past productions and lives resonate in the imagination, teased out by contemporary dance apparitions who tumble between seats and over metal pipes. By inviting people to temporarily view the building in a different light, the piece is engagingly immersive for 45 minutes but it fails to make any lasting emotional or intellectual impressions.

There's a similar superficiality to It Burns It All Clean from Selina Thompson, a promenade performance that guides the audience through the unemployment system via the medium of a game show.

At times comic, at others caustic and close to the bone, there's a wonderful attention to detail in the machine that spews out endless reams of paper listing the price of basic foodstuffs and the telephone service that takes the listener in ever-descending circles of frustration.

Despite the suspicion that the production seeks to make a valid critique of the benefit system and how claimants are viewed, the concluding social comment feels tagged on rather than being fully integrated. It seems very much like a work in progress that needs tightening up to bring out its best.

The need for further editing is also true of Am I Dead Yet? by Unlimited Theatre. An early glimpse of a new storytelling show, it explores mortality and the shifting understanding of death.

Inspired by research into contemporary developments in resuscitation science, the piece combines conversation, song and a degree of audience interaction in a manner that's alternately funny, thought-provoking and informative - the number of people nationwide who've had a cardiac arrest during the duration of the show is flagged up.

Elements of the script currently seem a little too forced to work but if Jon Spooner and Chris Thorpe can relax into the piece, it has every indication of being one to watch in the future.

It's less obvious where The
Albemarle Sketchbook by Chris Goode and Company will develop over the coming months. A work in progress, inspired by a dream in which Goode was "really happy," the piece combines an ambitious array of ideas that includes contemporary dance and a show-within-a-show concept.

These disparate threads have a dreamlike fluency that contain moments of humour and companionable sentiment, some of which appear to be unscripted. Other scenes have a stilted quality to acting and script and, most frustratingly, none of them quite form a cohesive whole.

Maddening in its lack of clear direction, it'll be intriguing to see how the finished piece develops over time. It's these fascinatingly unsatisfying tasters, however, that unite with pieces that will stay in the mind for a long time that combine to create the creative energy and vibrancy within Transform's programme.

Commendably eclectic and experimental, its return can't come soon enough.