Sounds interesting, right? It is – Redgen’s gradual descent into madness makes for a great story. The problem with Twinception is it’s the kind of story better suited for a 20-minute set at a storytelling night. As an hour-long comedy show, it falls flat.

Redgen has a natural charisma and an effable stage persona, but he can’t seem to decide if he wants this show to be a story of mental illness littered with a few humorous anecdotes, or a comedy show grounded by his manic episodes. The show is littered with odd gimmicks – a pre-recorded narrator whom Redgen tries to play off; an awkward audience demonstration of the popular dice game that he mastered in Thai bars, a dance-off with someone from the crowd – all of which struggle to add meaning or laughter to his story.

Where Twinception suffers most is in its odd treatment of his mania. Redgen seems unsure whether he’s going for black humour or real tension when he talks about the night he became so adept at Jackpot that he convinced himself he was a super hero, Dice Man, and he’d reform the X-Men. Later, after an incident that sees him separated from his twin brother, he convinces himself that he and his twin have become one person, hence the show’s title. Yet Redgen comes across as incredulous towards his own story, as if he’s trying to highlight both the tragedy and absurdity of his predicament yet failing to explore either. There’s a good story here, and maybe it was opening show jitters or the relatively small turnout, but Twinception never figures out what it’s supposed to be.

Twinception runs at The Courthouse Hotel’s Jury Room from September 30 to October 4. Tickets on sale now through the Fringe website.

In Beat, Coffey restlessly jumps between short bursts of stand-up and comedic musical numbers. Armed with a guitar, a looping pedal and one hell of a powerful voice, Coffey’s songs are deceptively complex. He’ll open with a simple guitar riff or a vocal refrain, add layer upon layer of melodies to establish a solid rhythm, then deliver a fistful of punchlines that’ll alternate from crass sex jokes to hilarious double-entendres in the space of half a verse.

Coffey firmly subscribes to the notion that the best comedy comes from tragedy – he says as much early in his set, when he jokes that “there’s no misery section in the Fringe program.” But Coffey is an expert at walking the line between sadness and satire. Even when he’s decrying his shortcomings as a boyfriend, a friend or a man, his firmly avoids the trap of self-pity or sentimentality. Even his more tragic material, like his penultimate song about unrequited love, seamlessly merges heartfelt sincerity with endearing jocularity. If a tech run is this funny, the real thing’s going to be a riot.

Ryan Coffey – Beat runs at The Imperial Hotel’s Parliament Room at 10.30 every night until October 2. Tickets are on sale now through the Fringe website.

Exit Everything unfolds in a series of semi-autobiographical vignettes. Mackay plays an exaggerated version of her younger self, fully embracing the mythology of the Chelsea Hotel and the 27 club. Her bombastic persona dominates over the more measured ruminations of McAuley, whose narrative is looser and less-defined. In the play’s opening vignettes, the performances feel overwrought, but as the amplified, self-referential nature of the content unveils itself, it becomes evident that Mackay and McAuley are exaggerating their naive younger selves, simultaneously celebrating and poking fun at their own youthful idealism.

The silent star though is the show’s third man and soundtracker, Andrew Dalziell. Dalziell doesn’t utter a word for most of the performance. Armed with a guitar, his main role is to play the sonic backdrop, but he becomes the source of much of the show’s comedy. His expressive and expertly timed reactions offering the perfect foil to Mackay’s and McAuley’s philosophical meanderings, making Exit Everything a compelling and captivating piece of experimental theatre.

Exit Everything runs at the Workers’ Club at 6pm on September 27 and at 7pm from October 1-3. Tickets on sale now through the Fringe website.

And that’s what this show is ultimately about: decontextualisation. Lost in the Looping Glass takes the notion of a solo violin recital and flips it on its head – rather than a recital hall or a concert space, Bower’s performance takes place in an intimate warehouse space, the kind more commonly suited to a DIY punk show. She separates her 45-minute performance into short sections – less like the movements of classical music and more like songs, four to five minutes in length. She plays her violin in such a way that it sounds nothing like a violin: in one section, her loops are reminiscent of a chorus of whalesong; in another, she plucks the strings with her fingers to build a percussive loop that sounds like the clanking of rocks. It’s a thrilling re-imagining of sonic capabilities of the violin that makes for an enrapturing performance.

After Bower’s final section the loops fade out, bar the oscillating of two notes – the same first two notes that opened the performance. She places her violin down beside her, sits down, the orange light is switched off, and the loop is closed.

Lost in the Looping Glass plays at Scratch Warehouse in North Melbourne from October 1-3. Tickets on sale now through the Fringe website.

The three characters are all housemates – adults in age but maybe not maturity. There’s Nicki (Catherine Glavicic), an RSVP user hoping to break a streak of awful first dates; Derek (Allen Laverty), a middle-aged divorcee on the rebound with a Russian internet girlfriend who he lies to about his wealth; and Jack (Preston Forsyth), an unemployed Tinder obsessive who tells would-be dates that he’s a fitness obsessive and financial manager, when in actuality his main priorities are video games and sending unsolicited photos of his junk.

This isn’t exactly groundbreaking territory, but where Detached excels is in its subtle illustration of our fractured communications. Many of the conversations we see are actually half-conversations and second-hand stories. Derek engages in cringe-inducing Skype-sex with his girlfriend, Nicki recalls the sordid details of her doomed romantic encounters and Jack spends so much time talking to Siri on his iPhone that she becomes his closest confidant. Detached gets its biggest laughs when it grants Siri a sliver of self-awareness, turning her (it?) into a sympathetic version of HAL 9000.

The set is sparse and claustrophobic – all of the action takes place around a couch, a dining table and a toilet – but the actors use it well to drive the play’s central point home: that even though we’re living closer together, we’re so much further apart. When the characters demand space, this distance between them is further exemplified: Derek demands privacy to talk dirty to his laptop in the living room so Jack Tinders on the toilet, dictating a contrived version of his life to Siri in an attempt to impress would-be dates. A light alternates between the two characters as their respective romantic hopes turn dire.

It’s the pacing, though, where Detached falls short. Forsyth, Laverty and Glavicic are each well-rounded performers, and Glavicic in particular shines during her cathartic monologue on the failures of modern men during the play’s climax. Yet much of the show’s dialogue is so rushed that the deliveries feel forced. If their dialogue had a little more room to breathe, the trio’s playful ribbing and revelatory exposition might come off as naturalistic, but instead it’s delivered so hastily that Detached feels like an hour-long play crammed into 45 minutes. And maybe that’s a part of a larger point – that technology speeds up communication at the expense of meaning and nuance. It’s a valid point of concern, but in practice it turns a smart idea into middling theatre.

Detached continues at Shebeen at 7.30pm and 9.30pm on Wednesday September 16, Tuesday September 22 and Wednesday September 23. Tickets are available from the Melbourne Fringe website.

“I sat down in my bedroom, looking into the lounge room,” he says. “And I started thinking, where should I do it? And I just thought, I could do it right here.”

While performing in his lounge room is certainly a new experience, Green is by no means a stranger to the stage. After studying theatre at Monash University, Green moved to Sydney and then to New York, where he trained with a theatre company for several years, before returning home to Melbourne in 2014.

Green’s most recent stage credit was in The Sol III Company’s production of The Exonerated in Melbourne this past May. First performed in the US in 2002, The Exonerated explores the American justice system through the stories of six wrongfully convicted inmates. Green was cast as Gary Gauger, a man who spent almost three years on death row after being falsely accused of murdering his parents in 1993.

Even in those darkest moments representing a real-life tragedy, Green was able to find a playfulness in his character, exploring the relationship between drama and comedy. He says that this relationship informs his comedy, too.

“There was sort of a lightness to [the play] that we were encouraged to seek out, and that’s what most of comedy is – transmuting these dark parts of ourselves into something with a little bit more lightness to it and something we can laugh at.”

Ah Yes, The Music is not a musical comedy show per se, though it is about music. Green describes it as a show about relationships – both familial and romantic – and growing up with music. The meaning of the title becomes clear during the performance, he says, revealing that his mother once uttered the phrase during her sleep.

Green has been performing stand-up on and off for six years – both in Australia and New York – but this will be the first time in Green’s  career that he’s onstage by himself for a full sixty minutes. Though he finds it a little daunting, he’s encouraged by the fact that many of his  peers have gone on to find creative and commercial success – particularly NOVA breakfast radio host Tommy Little, who started performing stand-up at the same time as Green.

“At that point, [Little] had such great clarity about what he wanted to do and how he wanted to do it,” says Green. “At that point I was still at university and I thought, ‘oh, I kind of still want to do this or that or explore this.’ And then when I came home [from New York], I ran into him in the street and he’d just done exactly what he said he’d wanted to do. And that gave me a lot of confidence. You just have to keep failing, or at least risking being an idiot, and that’s the only way you’re going to progress and get a little bit closer to doing exactly what you want to do.”

Joseph Green’s Ah Yes, The Music runs at the Tree House from 17 – 25, 29-30 September, 1 – 3 October at 7pm (5pm on Sunday),and at Long Play Bar on 26 – 27 September at 8pm and 5pm respectively.

Bok is no stranger to Melbourne’s comedy landscape – she’s a regular in comedy rooms throughout the city and in the past three years she has taken double- and triple-bill shows to Adelaide and Melbourne Fringe as well as Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

Though she is now writing on her own, collaboration and competition have helped Bok hone her craft. In addition to her joint shows, she was a cast member on  Live on Bowen, the RMIT-produced Channel 31 talk show, for two years before the show finished its run at the end of June this year.

“It definitely has been able to help me be more collaborative, to listen to other people,” she says of her time on the show. “But you also get that thing where you have to fight out – if you want to go, if you want something in the monologue, it has to be really sharp and it has to win, basically.”

“Comedy is slightly competitive,” she says wryly. “So [your idea] definitely has to be on the top of the pile and you have to learn how to fight to get it there. So [working on Bowen] made me go – it’s not some precious thing that I just hold onto and put out to the world – you actually have to, from the very first time that you have an idea or just a quick joke or whatever it is, you have to just slam it in people’s faces.”

Slamming Lauren Bok in people’s faces for an hour is more or less the theme of Is That A Burrito, though there’s a little more experimentation than her comedy club work.

“I think that is the theme – the theme is me. But it’s a little bit of the stuff I’ve been working on – just stuff white people like. Stuff white girls like. More, I guess, the theme is burritos, obviously. So maybe looking at the choices that we have to put on our burrito, and somehow you just want the perfect one, and sometimes the burrito can’t hold.”

“It’s a metaphor,” she adds sardonically.

Working on her own for the first time has, for better or worse, made for a much quicker writing process. “It’s definitely quieter than it has been,” she says. “It’s like, ‘what do you think about that Lauren? No, that’s great! That’s solid gold. You know what, don’t change that.’ And you go, ‘yeah, cool, well I’m writing this extraordinarily quickly! Everything’s fine.’”

Bok has a slew of bells and whistles planned for her nine-show run, including an introduction (of sorts) from acclaimed filmmaker Werner Herzog, as well as some surprise burrito-themed appearances at her penultimate show, which falls on her birthday. If all goes well, she may take Is That A Burrito to interstate Fringe Festivals, but for now, the focus is on preparing to get through these first nine shows.

“It’ll be me putting my stuff out there, having trial shows, showing stuff to friends and family and just making them really sick of the show before it’s on. And then they have to come and pay and see it, so that’s my plan.”

Lauren Bok’s Is That a Burrito in Your Pocket or Are You Just Happy You Have A Burrito runs at The Court House Hotel in North Melbourne from 16-25 September, at 8.30 pm (7.30 pm on Sunday). For tickets visit www.melbournefringe.com.au or call (03) 9660 9687.

This year, McGrath is one of 18 artists selected to partake in the second iteration of the Melbourne Fringe Festival’s public art program, Uncommon Places. But while his airport mural invites the public to observe, his latest creation is about encouraging audiences to interact with and ultimately destroy his work.  It’s a piece rooted in the nebulous relationship between art and sports – specifically the AFL practice of players bursting through a fabric banner before the commencement of a match.

“I’ve always found it very interesting and bizarre, the idea of making a banner for your team and then they destroy it with this big brute force before the match,” McGrath says of the work. “But there also are similarities between that and art history with the Japanese avant-garde and Klein with The Void. I thought I could have a bit of fun and see where it went.”

But McGrath won’t be emblazoning his work with football sponsors. Instead, he intends the pieces to be a playful jab at the asinine aphorisms we see on the internet, in chain letters and in Facebook and Twitter memes. “It’s about you, but it’s really about me, like humblebragging sort of stuff,” he says. “These slogans would appear on the banners, and I just like the idea of intervening in the daily life of workers and people occupying the city during the week, be it Monday morning, Wednesday afternoon or Friday night, inviting them to come and partake in this art/sporting performance.”

The banners will appear at random, undisclosed locations throughout the city, with members of the public encouraged to burst through and destroy the work à la football players at the beginning of a match.

McGrath says the work emerged out of frustration with the lack of tangible outcomes in a public art piece he produced in Dunedin, New Zealand. In response to a proposed high-rise hotel development that drew mixed reactions from the public, McGrath suspended a giant yellow luftballon 96 metres in the air to demonstrate how the hotel would dominate Dunedin’s skyline.

“I was finding it difficult to gauge the success of the work when it was out in the public forum,” McGrath says. “There was no monetary way of gauging success through money or bums on seats; it was all through hearsay and bits of information that just kind of like trickled through after the actual intervention.”

For McGrath, the opportunity to witness the general public transform his Uncommon Places piece in a tangible and observable way is a welcome opportunity.

“Like all the performance and public art that I’ve done, whenever you invite the public to get involved, you never know what they’re going to do. So you can only plan to a point and then push it out and see what happens.”

McGrath’s Uncommon Places installations will be placed at randomly selected locations throughout the CBD during Fringe. The documentation of the performances will be featured at 123/129 Victoria Street, Melbourne, in the shop window of Market Sports at the Queen Victoria Market Food Court.