He stands very still as his planned route vanishes, watching stoically, without indignation or pathos.Sometimes, Plan B tries too hard, especially when it moves away from the stripped-down performance of its early scenes. The company will pretend to juggle – those disembodied hands, or balls bouncing on to a door and reappearing on the other side of the stage. The performers lean against a floor, wriggle across slopes, all the while carrying themselves as if upright. Their progress turns into slow-motion acrobatics, languidly intricate back-flips and somersaults, resting on an angled surface.Much of the show is mathematical exercise as comedy.

Juggling-balls ricochet from ledges, then bounce back from their owners. Doors open under performers, who slide neatly out of sight through tiny gaps. They juggle using what turn out to be other people’s hands, or walk normally against the pull of gravity The timing is pointedly good So is the juggling. Compagnie 111, a Toulouse-based group directed by New Yorker Phil Soltanoff, consists of four men in sober suits who tidily do impossible things. They are all circus-trained, and as they juggle and tumble, they play tricks with perspective.
The set for Plan B is a wall, with closeable doors and moveable ledges, but it isn’t often upright. “Why?”Mere Mortals is refreshing theatre, intelligent without being pretentious, and easily skips register from the silly to the sombre.

The performers are strong, particularly the sassy Kirsty Bushell, whose delivery and accents are spot-on To Saturday (020-7837 7816). It’s a scene that captures the anxiety that pervades modern living. The American accents and the whoop of sirens below suggest a New York setting and an expression of the neurosis that hangs over the city. “I’m so afraid all the time,” the girlfriend tells her boyfriend. She is sure she can hear noises of distress, through the wall, from the flat next door and pesters her boyfriend about them. He is dismissive of her concerns, pats the bed and tells her again and again to “come in tight”, a characteristically ambiguous phrase that promises both comfort and constraint.

It depicts a young couple in bed at night, with the girl struggling to sleep. It is, as Jimmy Nail once remarked, like d? vu all over again.”Bolero”, next, constitutes a change of pace, moving from the surreal to the mundane. “Will you send me the bill, Will?” the patient asks.”I will,” the doctor replies.It could have come across as terribly self-satisfied, but it’s infused with such vim and linguistic playfulness by the doubles that one is left smiling at the inventiveness of the dialogue and its implications. On stage alongside her, her doppelg?er is undertaking the same interview in silence, the actors mimicking each other’s movements.The scene is executed with precision and synchronicity: the patients lean forward in perfect unison, and the doctors remove a speck of fluff from their jumper with the same dismissive flick. The farcical dialogue that zips between the patient and her doctor, the appropriately named Bill Williams, abounds with puns, palindromes and punchlines.