I’m a massive fan of the 24 Hour Plays for several reasons. It seems to come at just the right time of year - a sort of festive get-together for the theatrically inclined, like playing an enormous game of Boxing Day charades. In fact, that is precisely what makes it so much fun – it’s not very slick, no one is expecting it to be, and it would miss the point if it was. Instead it’s a celebration of the possibilities theatre gives us – starting with a word on a page, within one full spin of the earth a team of 9 will have come up with an entire complete creation, one that could have gone down any route that the entire scope of the stage affords us.

Indeed it was interesting to see just how much the idea of what a “play” was or should be differed according to who was writing the script. Having acted and directed in these things before, I could almost taste the fear of the teams as the curtain went up: what if our play has completely misjudged the tone? What if we produced something serious while everyone else went for wacky?  What if our messing around with fart gags looks cheap compared to the other four teams, who’ve all offered a daring thesis on the nature of power told through physical theatre and discordant soundscapes?

The random running order affects our appreciation of the plays in this way: it was a shame that Sian Docksey’s madly ambitious Imagination, featuring Harry Sheehan dealing with a post-breakdown series of hallucinations about lemmings and the classical figure of Icarus, came last – the tenor of the evening by this stage wasn’t quite up to dealing with the less-than-readily-comprehensible. Nevertheless Docksey came up with something bold and dark, far too stretched within its ten-minute running time. Although a wonderful Poppy Damon spouting New Age nonsense about “orang-utan Herbal Essences shit” was a peach.

At the other end of the scale, we had two plays that were essentially extended sketch ideas. Both of them were very funny, but I couldn’t help thinking that you get away without doing an awful lot of the characters, motivations, beginning-middle-end stuff that actual plays have if you base your piece around a single joke. At least they were good jokes, though – Matilda Wnek’s sketch-writing experience had clearly come to the fore for her Satisfaction, based around the charming parlour trick of a machine that transforms actors into themselves, but played by different actors (it made sense at the time). As she explained in Beard, the trick is to always raise the stakes – watching a stern Hugh Stubbins and James Parris lose control of a situation until human-dinosaur hybrids were set loose and an apple possibly contained a soul was a masterclass in slow-burn, inevitable fulfilment of comic concept . Nevertheless, it remained a stage trick well-executed but ultimately inconsequential.

Ceci Mourkogiannis also wrote with essentially a sketch idea in mind, but it was so well-done it deserved its winning the prize of the night. Set in a nightmare literal version of the internet where our protagonist Sam Rayner can never find the thing he’s looking for, Information had enough interesting things to say about being human in a digital world to carry it through. I recognised the Kafkaesque dystopia of cat videos and passive aggressive search  engines- and Oli Marsh and Matt Clayton as malign Google-gremlins gave fantastic panache to what I imagine was Mourkogiannis’ account of her own terror of being up at 4am attempting to search for inspiration.

Andrea Tudose’s More was an odd thing that didn’t seem to go anywhere in particular, but was a nice enough way to pass ten minutes – partly because the five actors are really, really watchable in anything they do. Personal relationships are established, tension is raised, “Shag, Marry, Kill” is played. Hugh Wyld proves surprisingly convincing as drunk and violent.

Radio, by Guy Clark, had the germs of something really good in it- radio DJs are inherently hilarious and tragic characters (see Partridge, Alan) and the idea of an on-air meltdown was dramatically interesting, but a split focus didn’t do it many favours, clever as it wanted to be. It had several things in its favour though – Will Chappell’s mesmerising naked dancing, some razor-sharp exchanges, and an award-winningly good Emma Sidi to deliver them. “Everything retro is good” remains my favourite line of the night.

After yet another term of heady professionalism and slickness from the theatre world, how nice it is to celebrate with an event where everything could have gone spectacularly wrong, and was never going to be perfect in the first place. The slipshod, rushed, line-slipping 24 Hour Plays remind us of just how plays come to be in the first place, and how much joyous amateurism that comes with sprouting ideas out of nowhere. Good thing too. Long live the A in ADC.