It isn't true, though, is it?

All live artists need a onesie

I am frequently entranced by the unpleasantness of the dialogue between religious and scientific fundamentalists. It is my own fault for discovering American talk radio. A nation that has more faith in freedom of speech than fear of hate speech may seem idyllic to a critic, but five minutes of vague hippy bluster being ripped to shreds by a shouty conservative is enough to make me reconsider.

Both sides in the science versus religion debate seem to have trouble with ontological categories. 

Now, I admit my grasp of science is shaky and realise that talking about scientific fundamentalists is a bit cheeky (I mean those people who use atheist as a code-word for intelligent and mistake theoretical models for physical facts – Richard Dawkins just about escapes the gang). But everyone who bellows that their version of the universe is literal, historical or physical truth is probably missing something. Probably the possibility that language is too limited to express reality, and mos def humility.

Luckily, I am a theatre critic. I get to noodle about with fictional truth all day. I’ll leave that little phrase hanging there, and rush on to pick out some hot fringe action that is never in any doubt that is not literal truth. Even verbatim theatre is not really verbatim, is it?

Our first slot this evening goes to Humans Inc (C Venue). This one explores ‘what it means to be human’ by making up a bunch of lies about life in 2440AD. Aside from the optimism that humans are still going to be tanking about in three hundred years time, I love the way that fantasies call themselves science fiction if they have conscious computers instead of dragons. Assuming the finale doesn’t involve over-weight men pulling green skinned alien chicks and shooting phasers at each other, I am hoping this metaphorical story of the future holds the same resonance as Philip K Dick or Stanislaw Lem.

Next up, we have The Cherry Orchard (C Aquila). I like a bit of Chekov: his work might be overdue a telegram from the queen, but he provides a comprehensive and coherent theoretical model for the behaviour of a family caught between pride in status and hard financial necessity. There’s always a question – is Chekov having a laugh, or weeping? At least this one only has a family having to move out of the ancestral home, and off-stage suicide attempts aren’t being played for laughs.

I flip the page and get I’m With The Band (Traverse), a parable about the break-up of the United Kingdom. The set up is a bit like one of those 1970s’ gags: an Englishman, an Irishman, a Scotsman and a Welsh man are in a band…

I hope that this is really a prophecy about Coldplay splitting up. I know it is going to address that independence question that people who aren’t reading The Blind Watchmaker and No Man is an Island as parallel texts spend time considering. The Scotsman is the guitarist and he wants to go solo. Hey, if it’s like The Smiths, that means the English singer will become an embittered racist while the guitarist spends twenty years in sunglasses trading on memories of past glories.

Number five has to be some Shakespeare. Just to kill two fashionable birds with one stone, let’s go for a version that has a single-sex cast. It’s Titus Andronicus (Bedlam Theatre). I’m sure Titus was thought to be unperformable a decade ago, but then they made the film and, besides, the neo-brutalists (Saint Sarah, Mark Ravenhill) made theatre audiences happy to have plenty of blood on the stage. I often complain that Shakespeare is presented with little thought for contemporary relevance. This cheeky number makes plenty of sense in the twenty-first century, being excessively violent.

I can’t resist my final choice: George Galloway’s Fighting Talk (The Assembly Rooms). George is not a politician who fills me with enthusiasm for the potential of the left to provide moral guidance in a time of chaos. It isn’t that he lacks passion or belief – and I won’t blame him for that Big Brother incident. I worry that he lacks the kind of integrity that ought to match his sincerity. So, I can hardly resist the challenge to slap his serious musings into a preview full of references to fiction, suggesting that theatre might be spectacular, but it doesn’t have the monopoly on the aestheticisation of ideas.