The Movement weren’t the only people holding a Dionysia in Cambridge on Monday night. The 24 Hour Plays, if anything, surely also deserve the title of a mad and suspiciously cultic theatre-generating festival. Founded here in 2009, the evening remains testimony to the wealth of talent that this town has to offer, in a wide variety of theatrical styles, across all the different aspects of play-making. It was also testimony to the remarkable producing powerhouse of Debbie Farquhar and Steph Aspin. The months of work Farquhar admitted to putting into this project showed; she built on last year by introducing a higher-profile judging panel and a handy programme snazzily designed by Edward Quekett.

Not that it was perfect – frankly, with a day’s worth of preparation, we’d all be sickened if it was. You have to pity the writers really. It’s not just a matter of having to drag themselves through the small hours crafting dialogue fuelled by instant coffee – writing a 15-minute play for five actors is a pretty thankless commission at any time. You have to sail between the Scylla of a breathless synopsis of a one-act play and the Charybdis of an over-extended sketch. KT Roberts’s opening piece, All, fell into the former trap: the short running-time meant that an attempt at a family saga was forced heavy-handedly onto some fun about sweets. Lowell Belfield’s Truly perhaps tended towards the latter, offering a portrait of the deluded Helena Dance that somehow felt less than the sum of its (albeit funny) parts. Still, these two plays had their share of great moments: a nice line in malapropism from Roberts (‘Lazaratus’, ‘candybibbles’); Stephen Bermingham exuding effortless style as a night-club pianist; an appropriately rough-and-ready set for All which forced Ami Jones to try and sit on a bar stool with hilarious consequences. Oh, and awesome programme notes from Belfield.

If the first two plays sometimes demonstrated vaulting ambition which o’erleaps itself (see Lowell, the Macbeth’s catching), Hellie Cranney kept things simpler with her hospital drama and picked up the Best Script award from the judges. While I can see what attracted them to it – well-balanced characterisation and a clear, if inconclusive, structure – the script never really surprised me and I didn’t get its link to the trigger word, Start. What impressed me more here was Adam Drew’s unnerving calmness in distress and Fred Maynard’s attention to detail in his physical direction.

It was the final two plays that got the closest to all-round success. As a father with a guilty secret, Edward Eustace was the driving force behind Innocence and thoroughly deserved his Best Actor award; Pippa Scarcliffe likewise earned Best Design by finding just the right combination of green party-hats, snippets of Vivaldi and graceful lighting changes to match Nikki Moss’s quirky direction. Crowning glory goes to the surreal conclusion provided by Wicked: Ryan O’Sullivan offered a punchline-packed script that was also a masterclass in economy, and James Parris showed off his versatility to lead a great ensemble. It came out with a glut of awards, including Best Overall Play from both judges and audience.

But, in the end, despite the urgent need those prizewinners probably had for a free drink in the ADC bar, it’s not about the awards. Even the less outstanding stuff last night was still better than many supposedly finely-honed sketches and mainshows I’ve seen. Sleep well everyone – and same time next year?