Recommended by Alice Josephs

In art bubbles, an age old iconography, are a symbol of brevity, of life, its pleasures and eventually became part of a scientific fascination with colour, the quality of film in bubbles and innovation. Here Levine transforms symbolism of painting into a light-as-a-bubble riff on keeping folks afloat in a precarious world. His male protagonist retains childlike curiosity of kids and cherubs in those paintings as he entices a woman - and us - into his lifesaving world. A delicately constructed, fragile and inventive piece holding the audience’s attention and a gorgeous balancing act for director and actors.

The Making Of Us is clever and affecting, forcing the audience to consider how we narrate and judge our own lives and, sometimes unfairly, the lives of others. With simple staging, we see several ‘snippets’ from a couple’s lives, but never as a linear experience, as if on a wheel of fortune spinning round and stopping randomly at points in the making and unmaking of a marriage and two distinct personalities. With fluent and almost filmic transitions, this is a gift for director, sound and lighting crew, actors and stimulating and thought provoking for any audience.

Two matronly Americans arrive in Rome with lively daughters who cannot imagine their mothers as romantic young women in the Eternal City. Part a memory play, the two widows recall the past, seemingly comparing each other with honesty, and their late husbands. But the playwright uses dance and quiet symbolism to thread a more erotic and wilder reality beneath the imperturbable marble surface of the older women as if in a hidden satyric fresco. Gradually conversation of younger and older generations build up personalities until a final twist when dynamics dramatically reverse. A pitch perfect and sensitive adaptation.

This play takes us on the voyage with a bereaved sister as suddenly time has run out and a sibling is gone for ever. But not a package she has left behind. Clever and endearing, this carefully paced duologue on bereavement, secrets and discovery has humour and poignancy as Erin discovers the sister she thought she knew.

A play of loss and make believe, this is an original take on two lost souls finding solace in an encounter. With two rich roles for an older female and male actor, the playwright skilfully through dialogue paints a vivid picture of the homelife of each of the pair before a final reversal allows the possibility that a brighter future is only a train ride away.

A poignant, fantastical fable of the sudden metamorphosis of a young wife into a vixen and the husband who tries to cling onto his wife as vulpine characteristics gradually overcome her. This is an inventive dramatic adaptation of a 1922 novella by a literary Bloomsbury Set member. A trio of actors take on the roles of wife, husband and the wife’s almost ever-faithful nanny. But they also break the fourth wall as narrators commenting on the action and the loving husband’s attempt to accommodate the creature his wife has become. Easy-to-stage, this is a hauntingly imaginative piece.

Dealing with the fall out of two sisters and a family divided by ‘passing’, Black Like Us is a fluid and fluent play structured on two time scales. With an all female cast and with no easy answers, this family drama manages to touch on the lesser thought of reasons and then implications of mixed race citizens passing as white without feeling heavy handed. With strong characters and a plot with attitude which never lapses into sentimentality, this is a clear-sighted look at a tangled subject and tangled lives.

The Lottery - part of the democratisation of wealth - and luck - in consumer America. Setting redneck America against the latest wave of immigrants, this play cleverly and humorously toys with stereotype while its gambling and gun (un)control context turns it into a ironic view of the modern promised land. An interesting challenge for director and actors and an original and thought provoking play for any audience.

An intensely theatrical short with two female French-speaking spies about to be parachuted into Occupied France by the British. The young women lay bare their hopes and fears, just before their leap into the unknown, exposing the psychology of those faced by danger, unsure of their enemy but also their own side, the males. Their back and forth repartee has a poetic quality and truthfulness, clinging to what they see as good omens in order to pluck up courage. With two glorious female roles, minimal staging and ratcheting up the tension, this is a piercing, adventurous piece.

It’s third time lucky in Larry Rinkel’s triumph-of-the-barista piece. Almost an updated Monty Python sketch for our latte-to-go times. Sweet and sharp, no firm, server or customer is harmed in the writing of this piece. But if one were going to read something in this frothy coffee amusing piece, it could say something about the way sales and society works.