This year (as you probably don’t already know) marks the 42nd Cambridge Drama Festival, part of the All England Theatre Festival, which showcases the best of the country’s amateur dramatics. It seemed appropriate, then, We Make Babies, a new piece by the young Sean Abbs, demonstrated several different approaches to theatre as its young couple argued about whether to have a child. The set adopted by the Estrella Theatre Company was simple, studio-esque: two stools and a trunk like a child’s dressing up box, from which all the props were produced. The sense that the couple (Kattreya Smith and Abbs himself) were the real children of the piece was reinforced by the actors’ playful and polished use of physical theatre, mime, and dolls to inject fantasy into their arguments. Smith was bolshy, with an underlying vulnerability, and Abbs reminded the reviewer of Matt Smith’s Timelord, all spindly nervosity and wonder. The acting wasn’t expansive enough for the size of the venue, and the exuberant youth of the characters meant that parenthood was never entirely credible. To the play’s credit, however, in the couple’s final musings, directed to the audience, it became clear that this was precisely the point.

The Mumford Theatre hosted two plays on Tuesday evening: second up was the Settlement Players’ take on Joe Orton’s The Ruffian on the Stair, a tricky customer to tackle. The surface of his plays reads ‘1960s kitchen sink drama’, something which the set of this production faithfully reflected. His language and characters, however, go beyond the ‘normal’ to uncover something stranger. Here, there was Mike, a dubious businessman who also happened to have killed someone, and his put-upon, constantly shocked wife Joyce, who also happened to have been a prostitute. The problem with this production was that many of the absurd obscurities and non-sequiturs were played straight and glossed over. Alex Miles as Wilson, the bereaved gay hairdresser, was the saving grace, relishing the absurdities of his lines with a giggly menace. Through his performance, it was possible to glimpse the black comedy of his suicidal intrusion into the couple’s life. The rest was sadly rather flat, and left the dark heart hidden below the ‘period’ surface.