There is no singular experience of Sugarglass Theatre Company's All Hell Lay Beneath, so perhaps  I may start by describing my own. After arriving in Cassidy’s, and having a Polaroid of myself taken and handed to me, I joined the rest of the audience downstairs for a bacchanalian dinner party where the cast of twenty-somethings was enacting the story of Steppenwolf.  That ended shortly after, and I was approached by a woman in a white lace dress who asked me to follow her up the back stairs of the pub. She soon asked to surrender my Polaroid and informed me I could be anyone I wanted there, before allowing me to wander the labyrinthine upstairs of Cassidy’s, past a couple human sculptures, a woman who protected me from falling paper shreddings with an umbrella, a silent disco and many other random installations. For a moment, I wondered if the performance was solely for me, but disappointingly, the rest of the audience was eventually ushered upstairs.

A cynic might call All Hell Lay Beneath an undergraduate aesthete’s ultimate dinner party. Yet roaming Cassidy’s corridors and interacting with the energetic performers for two hours does draw one outside of the humdrum experience of the everyday. The party lacks a sense of culmination, but one can exit  at any time: the only price of leaving is the Polaroid, which is shredded onto an actor playing dead.

Star rating: ★★★