If the Season One trio was more about distinguishing reality from fantasy, the plays that make up Season Two are more clearly aligned to the umbrella title, Merely To Be Normal. Most have been trimmed to meet the time and resource specifications necessarily imposed in this Honours level exercise.

Edward Albee’s first play, The Zoo Story – of which we get the first half: ‘The Story of Jerry and The Dog’ – compares and contrasts the ‘normal’ lives of two very different men who randomly meet in Manhattan’s Central Park.

Peter (Patrick Hunn), a publishing executive reading a book on a park bench, turns out to live between Lexington and Third Avenue, on Seventy-fourth Street, with a wife, two daughters, cats and two parakeets.

But it is Jerry (Barney Olsen) who has been to the zoo and has a story to tell. And ‘home’ for him is “a laughably small room” on the top floor of a four-storey brownstone rooming-house on the upper West Side between Columbus Avenue and Central Park West, peopled (among others) by an eyebrow-plucking, kimono-wearing “queen” and a rather repulsive, dipsomaniacal landlady. And her dog.

Hunn, Olsen and their director Samuel Phillips have chosen not to attempt New York accents but play it in their own natural voices while retaining the original location. This happily draws the focus to their inner feelings and motivations, as Jerry spins his bizarre yet credible yarns and Peter tries to get his measure.

Quite why Peter fiddles with a fake cigarette rather than the pipe Albee specifies is a mystery to me, as is Jerry’s aimless wandering downstage of Peter when there would be far more menace in his being upstage, just out of Peter’s peripheral vision. ‘Direct address’ is not an appropriate convention here, as the dynamics of a stranger invading someone’s personal space and behaving ‘abnormally’ according to social conventions needs to be a key driver in the staging.

These quibbles aside, the part of the play we see is clearly articulated and engagingly presented, compelling interest in – and empathy for – both characters. Does Jerry simply need to have a ‘normal’ conversation with someone ‘normal’? Does he perhaps envy, and even aspire to, Peter’s lifestyle? (Faux spoiler alert, given we don’t see the second half: The question raised by the end of the play is, has he been suicidal from the start and has he premeditated the role suddenly and shockingly thrust on Peter, or is it simply their very different experiences of ‘home’ which sparks the impulsive outcome?)

Samuel Beckett’s playlet Ohio Impromptu (1980) – so named because he wrote it to be performed at an academic symposium in Ohio to honour his 75^th birthday – deals with grief and coping with what’s left for the remaining loved one before their inevitable death.

An old man reads the last few pages of a book to his own likeness, head bowed and faceless: “Nothing is left to tell …” The words explore the author’s quest for “relief” in the wake of a loss and reveal how a complete change of scene was not the answer, whereas remaining with the familiar and ‘normal’ may have been.  

While in Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) Beckett has Krapp looking back at his life via a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and rewinding to replay his favourite bits, here the Listener (James Cain) raps on the table at which both men are seated, first to have the last phrase repeated, then to have the Reader (Patrick Carroll) resume the story.

As it plays out, the minimalist action before us and the narrative being read blend into one; likewise the Reader and the Listener also become one … Or were they always? “Nothing is left to tell.”

Director Jonathan Price lets the piece play out without rush or fuss which is just as it should be. His choice of the much older Beckett sketch Rough for Theatre 1 (late 1950s) as a companion piece is interesting for the contrasts it offers, from order to chaos and for the two male actors.

The swift ripping apart of the table and the strewing about of detritus to create the dystopian setting for Rough for Theatre 1 (set designed by Debbie Fish and lit by Rowan McShane) is a scene it itself, completed as Carroll transitions into his next role: A – a blind fiddle-scraping beggar.

Cain plays B, an irascible ‘cripple’, wheelchair-bound and brandishing a stick which – along with the power of sight – gives him the upper hand. Resonances with Waiting for Godot (1953) and Endgame (1957) abound. Beckett is on record as saying Hamm and Clov are Vladimir and Estragon (Didi and Gogo) in later life, and for me, especially given the twist at the end, this play feels like a variation on the Pozzo / Lucky relationship.

Price, Carroll and Cain have fashioned a compelling sketch here that keeps seeming to promise a breakout into comedy but remains overshadowed by Beckett’s dismal perception of the human condition. As it should.

Bronwyn Cheyne is the third director to showcase her skills in this second season of Merely to be Normal and the only one of the six over all to choose a New Zealand work. Thus she is the one who has not taken the ‘merely normal’ path, although I do feel it should be the norm rather than the exception with budding directors whose mission is to locate their authentic creative ‘voice’.  

Originally written as a Young & Hungry commission (1995), Fold is a satire of white middle-class ‘yuppie’ value systems. Karen (Kashmir Postel), Eileen (Jess Old), Pascall (Jake Brown), Roger (Nick Andrews) and John (Bruce Colban) routinely gather to celebrate each other’s birthdays with gift-giving, witty banter and subtly malevolent status games.

Identically dressed in backless hospital gowns, between scenes they flock to a washing line upstage, remove their white undies, peg them up and don clean ones. It’s a wonderfully absurdist device that says more than words could do.

Within the formal, ritualised social and dramatic structure, individual personalities slowly emerge while their collective wilful ignorance and arrogance exposes the anatomy of those who are sociopathic by default.

Individually and together the cast conveys the satire with conviction – abetted, as the world is heard crumbling around them, by Rowan McShane’s disturbing sound design.

The seasons have shown there is some good new directing talent coming through. The real test, however, and what the profession needs most, is for directors to take new plays from the page to the stage for the very first time. This is what separates the truly creative from the ‘merely recreative’ directors. I look forward to seeing who might step up to that challenging mark.

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