BAC, London
Battersea Arts Centre's One-on-One festival offers bite-sized adventures and surprising encounters all across a building that feels like a giant dressed set waiting for something to happen. Let yourself into a basement bedroom with a key card for David Rosenberg and Hannah Ringham's The Magical Number Seven, and you are in an apparently anonymous hotel room that takes on a life of its own, as if recalling the traces left behind of a previous guest. Upstairs in a room invaded by nature, you can drink imaginary tea and make a new friend in Kirsty Harris's poignant Neverhome, before you are shown the door out of childhood.
Audiences select a menu of shows that go under titles such as "Challenging" or "Dreamy", and although I'm not convinced that one main course and a couple of side dishes would create a sufficiently substantial evening for an over-eager theatrical truffle-hunter like me, extras are available.
Plenty of last year's hits including Ontroerend Goed's notorious Internal and Adrian Howells's bathing piece are on the menu, but there are masses of new shows: I adored Where the Wild Things Sleep, which takes you into the bedroom of Max in Maurice Sendak's children's picture book and sets you sailing on the wild seas of the imagination. Deborah Pearson's clever Indiscreet, meanwhile, turns eavesdropping into an artform.
Sometimes the best encounters are with yourself and that's the case with Melanie Wilson's Self-Portrait With Frida, a quietly absorbing few minutes that makes you really consider who you are. It's an intriguing, probing night and a showcase for a generation of artists busy questioning what theatre can and might be.