If the Junction isn’t on your radar as a theatre and performance venue in Cambridge, let this review be yet another gentle reminder that you’re missing out big time. If you’re a regular at the ADC, every term offers numerous opportunities when an extra £2 on the price of a ticket – and a short cycle ride southwards – separates you from some of the best and most innovative artists working, nationally and internationally, in theatre today.

Gym Party is an excellent example of what you’re missing. It’s an extraordinary and extremely refreshing piece about the human urge to win. Often duplicitous and always gripping, it brings the best and the worst out of its audience, ruthlessly pursuing its own internal logic to disturbing and entertaining conclusions. 

The piece takes the form of a competition between the three performers, using their own first names, which appear in helpfully colour-coded neon signs at the back of the stage. There can be only one winner of the evening, with carefully choreographed contingencies hardwired into the work’s DNA. Dressed in archetypal school PE kit, and notching up permanent fake nose bleeds when things don’t go to plan, the three weave mortifying stories of competitiveness into the proceedings, going straight to the heart of the orgy of contemporary egoism that unfolds on stage.

It might be helpful, if a little misleading, to label Gym Party ‘post-dramatic’. There’s some serious ‘play’ on offer, even if the piece absolutely can’t be described as ‘a play’. But the work does undoubtedly exploit with some dexterity the liberating potentials of the hard-to-define disciplines of Live Art and contemporary performance. The inherent cruelties, coercions, and embarrassments of the theatrical set-up are trained brilliantly on the specific targets of the performance – especially as the audience become increasingly implicated, sometimes by name and even in person, in the games being played.

Meanwhile, there is more than a playful nod to motifs of self-exposure and bodily endurance that connect the work loosely to a performance art tradition. When one performer holds back the bright blue wig of another while she vomits marshmallows into a bowl after a particularly hard-fought contest, we know that we have crossed into uncharted territories.

The canny audience at The Junction didn’t give the company an easy ride on the first stop of their national tour, exposing at times the points where breaking a few of the rules of theatre seems only to put even more weight on the ones left standing.

We undoubtedly took our cue from the company in what sometimes looked like a performer-audience stand-off. It is perhaps a testimony to the complex webs they wove that I more than once found myself looking at my fellow spectator and thinking ‘I’m a better audience member than you...’.