Theatre review: Forest Fringe, The Arches, Glasgow

IN THE wake of its breakout success at the Edinburgh Fringe, the Forest Fringe has spawned several "microfestivals", including this two-day Glasgow event.

With its cavernous, scarcely-defined spaces and shadowy intimacy, The Arches seems the ideal temporary lodging for this offshoot of local and visiting artists. You wander tentatively through the installations, playful distractions and works-in-progress, arriving at the next before you've had a chance to process the one before.

The earliest pieces one encounters are Stadium Rock's miscellaneous garments. Bearing the story of their purchase and an appeal to swap with an item of your own, it's an eye-catching, if roundly ignored, offer – unlike the chance elsewhere to commit your intimate thoughts to rice paper, and read and consume the thoughts of others.

In the basement, Deborah Pearson's Like You Were Before is the intense dissection of a rediscovered home movie, foregrounding the disparity between memory and record.

Everywhere, one is encouraged to interact, be it in the game of Pong that projects film of players concentrating, or a huge, cardboard dating computer, its matchmakers visibly collating the results.

Similarly, Third Angel and mala voadora make a virtue of their and their audience's general ignorance for What I Heard About The World, piecing together a political map from anecdotes, trivia and factoids.

David Overend epitomises the entire event, cramming a room with computers, records, musical instruments, bubbles, films, paper, inviting visitors to interact with the space as they see fit, in the generous if optimistic hope that something meaningful emerges.