“I think he’s planning to use whale noises,” Steve tells me. Lord Asriel in His Dark Materials formed an army to defeat the Catholic Church on a barren planet, but the sound design for his story is being worked out by on of the projection designer’s colleages, Dan Hoole, in a cluttered room round the back of a Birmingham theatre. He has a lot of work to do, though not all of it as exotic as working out how to represent cliff-ghasts: the list of sound effects covers everything from spectres in Cittagazze to traffic on the Oxford ring road. But considering that the Birmingham Repertory Theatre’s production takes in everywhere from Oxford physics labs in two worlds to the Arctic and Geneva and adapts an iconic book that, together with the Harry Potter books, defined the identity of its generation and redefined children’s literature, it’s not surprising: where to start?

The answer, production manager Milorad Zakula told me, was a series of meetings between him, the director and designer. Working from AutoCAD and a tight budget, they drew up a spare, simple set: steel towers down the side of the set supporting drapes and a bridge suspended from the theatres’ machinery; everything fits into two lorries. In his office (there was a bag of paper snow on the floor, going off to Korea for a tour of The Snowman), he showed me a plan on his computer, sprouting in three dimensions from a flat floorplan of a theatre, looking a little like a blueprint which just grew some legs. They worked out the staging of every scene with a model of the set: on the same computer is a series of photos of each scene, showing how the lighting changes and tables and chairs are brought on and off or a curtain lowered. Late on, the Oxford theatre was changed to the cramped Oxford Playhouse, requiring an emergency redesign: in another file on his computer is the cut-down version Philip Pullman will see when he comes to watch the Oxford run in Trinity. Budget was a major issue, Zakula told me: puppets cost more than expected, the production had to ask for more money from the theatre, and plans for a carpet of LEDs under the actor’s feet had to be scrapped.

The production is currently at an early stage: casting directors are looking for Wills and Lyras in the various cities the run goes through, and the theatre press officer, Victoria Price, took me through the various rooms of the theatre, showing me the costume store, make-up department (with a head of Mr. Tumnus left lying around from a past production), the welding shop, a rehearsal room, and the sound design room. She looked into one room to check nobody was using it, let me in, and on the floor of a bare white-painted room, double-glazed windows looking down onto a warehouse and some trees, the were the heads and spines of two armoured bears, completely finished and waiting for use. I’m going to be seeing it when it comes to Oxford, and I’m sure many other students will too. And if you see Philip Pullman in the seat beside you, ask him from me, just why did he erase Lincoln from the list of colleges in his alternate Oxford?

Jo Lovesey is a postgraduate in Philosophy from Merton. But Jo has a double-life: when she’s not trying to get to the ultimate truths of our metaphysical reality, she bewilders crowds at street and theatre festivals, dressed in a sleek vaudeville costume and enveloped in a cloud of dancing flames. She and her boyfriend Michael Rack, together with the unicyclist Lucas Wintercrane, form Pyrokinesis, one of UK’s top fire dancing troupes.

Cherwell: How did you get into fire dancing?

Michael: When I was eight I saw a guy juggling with devil sticks at a festival. I thought it looked amazing so I asked my mum to buy me some, and it all went from there… But I didn’t start using fire until I was 10 or 11.

Jo: Seven years ago, I saw some people playing with poi on a beach in Israel. I asked them to teach me and then practiced for hours every day. Then in 2006, I saw Mike performing at a club in Reading, where I did my BA. I wanted to have a go, so he auditioned me on the spot and we’ve been performing together since.

C: What kind of shows do you mostly put on?

M: The summer was really exhausting – we performed pretty much every weekend at festivals. We’ve done Glastonbury, Bestival, Camp Bestival, GuilFest, the Tárrega festival in Spain…

J Lately, we’ve been trying to make Oxford our base. We’ve done a gig at a Magdalen MCR event. I think they initially hired us to do something in the background, to look nice, but people were so fascinated that we ended up doing a whole show for them.

C: How’s health and safety? Ever burnt your fingers?

M: Yes, I’ve got some scars, Jo, haven’t I?

J: We’re doing this choreography which requires us to step past one another and…

M: Jo didn’t!

J: So I ended up wrapping one of my poi around Mike’s wrist.

M: Otherwise, it’s not dangerous – we’ve never inflicted any damage on the crowd or had any claims on our insurance.

C: You’re also pretty big on breaking world records…

M: We broke the world’s biggest fire show record at a circus festival in 2006 – 201 fire dancers in a choreographed routine. It looked amazing, but unfortunately we couldn’t authenticate it with the Guinness people. So, we’re re-doing it for the next Bonfire Night. We’re also planning the biggest dance routine (1200 people) and the biggest circus act (323).

C: What have you got coming up?

M: The next big thing we’ve got planned is a circus festival in Canada. And we’re planning to do a fire show on ice. We want to get a whole bunch of figure skaters and jugglers, teach them each other’s skills, put everyone on the ice and see what happens!

J: If there are any ice skaters or jugglers interested in joining up, they should get in touch via our website. We’re also looking for people to participate in our next attempt at the world record – so get in touch!

www.pyrokinesis.co.uk

Three stars

Most murder mysteries have a sense of the absurd, but this one, by current Exeter student Sarah Hand, goes further than most. Halfway through an awkward dinner party, the host escorts his guests and angry wife into the greenhouse, locks them in and tells them that nobody leaves until he’s discovered who murdered his plants. The chaos that follows is well-observed and well acted: Struan Murray is perfect as the deranged host Ronald, one moment threatening a guest with a trowel and the next cooing over his plants, Annina Lehmann has a lot of fun with the role of mysterious femme fatale Vlada, who angrily insists that she’s from Croydon, and Nicholas Pullen makes the most of his role as a bluff, hearty guest who always says the wrong thing (sample: “Well, Ronald, you may have lost your wife and your son and your friends, but you’ve kept your…er, your integrity. Yes.”)

Where the play falls down is in plotting: for a murder mystery, there isn’t a lot of mystery or that many red herrings, and though there are a lot of good one-liners, it can’t quite match Whodidit? at the TSAF last year for sheer deranged, sustained invention, though I loved the fact that the three couples present are Mr. and Mrs. A, B, and C. It’s a lot of fun, very well characterised and it fits perfectly into the Pilch Studio, which has exactly the right reverberant acoustic to bounce Ronald’s shouting off for maximum effect, but it never quite becomes brilliant comedy.

Further information on The Cactus Where Your Heart Should Be, as well as interviews with the cast and author

Two stars

David Mamet’s Squirrels follows the story of Arthur (Charles Reston), an arrogant writer who is adamant that his latest work must open with an incident involving a squirrel, but who cannot settle on a suitable scene. His protégé Edmund (Archie Davies) tries vainly to help, whilst also enduring his educator’s pretentious literary babble about such abstractions as ‘form’ and ‘concept’. Eleanor Rushton completes the cast as the cleaning woman, whose purpose primarily consists of ridicule and flirting.

Where the action may seem lacking, the clever humour of Mamet’s dialogue shines through, and this production, directed by Alev Scott, focuses on the play’s comic potential.

Reston brings a lot of energy to the stage as the suitably annoying Arthur, and perfectly captures his excessive excitement and exasperation over various hypothetical squirrel episodes. The quick-fire dialogue between him and Edmund, played for laughs, is particularly well-timed so that Arthur’s patronising tone manages to be amusing rather than just irritating. The cleaning woman’s own wild literary efforts are humorous in their eccentricity, but much of her comic innuendo – and there is plenty of it – falls flat.

As the play progresses, the inevitable power shift between Arthur and Edmund generates scenes of more emotional content, and the tragedy of Arthur’s realisation that he is losing his creative touch is not quite captured in this production. Although erratic and angry, we never see the writer’s insecurity and despair as he resorts to turning to the cleaning lady for comfort, and so he remains nothing more than a parody of the egotistical intellectual.

The play is enjoyable as light-hearted entertainment, and Scott makes good use of the space to keep the audience engaged without distracting from the actors’ skilful characterisations. Nevertheless, the banality of the plot is eventually frustrating, and cannot ultimately be held together with one-liners and comic asides, however amusing these may be in isolation.