The Last Cuckoo and The Confetti Maker, October 27 and 30, 2010 Wilde Theatre, Bracknell South Hill Park has a wide variety of shows, even in a single week! First up was The Last Cuckoo, a new play by Julie Amanda Bokowiec, and this was scarily topical. Set in the future after some great global catastrophe that happened in 2012, a man was now living in a desert area and alone, except for a strange, seemingly mute young girl with a compulsive obsessive disorder.

With no modern conveniences or contraptions to distract him his only refuge was the past, so he escaped into the world of his mind, a remembered map of invisible rooms each with treasured possessions and long gone people. A fine performance by Paul Copley (Clem MacDonald in the TV series Torchwood) as the man and newcomer Olivia Vinall as the girl, in this intelligent play that I’m sure will do well.

At the weekend was something completely different with Frank Wurzinger and his new one man show about the precision, boredom and inventiveness of an employee with a humdrum job, making confetti. Using slapstick, puppetry and improvisation, every action sent Frank into his world of dreams and the part where he made his bride out of a roll of wallpaper and almost come alive was heartbreakingly lovely. As was the baby made from a bundle of shredded paper, and I expect the man in the audience who had to hold and look after it thought so too.

Marion Mansfield