Run

How do you distill the essence of life in a big city into a one hour show? Try throwing 11 poets in a room together each week for a year and see what walks out the door at the end.

Crafted by a gaggle of writers in new collective A Cloud of Foxes with director Yael Shavit, Run is a bright, adventurous bike ride of a show which breezes through city streets and peers into buzzing kitchens or lonely bedrooms.

It's being put on as part of the Roundhouse's exciting new spoken word and poetry festival The Last Word.

As 11 performers shift around a bare set, a patchwork story of characters emerges, from the dead normal to funny comic book oddities. There's Sean Mahoney's shy Superman cape-wearing geek, Nihaarika Negi's chilly perspective of life as a living sushi table and Toby de Angeli's and Debo's boys graffiti-ing a bonsai tree on an abandoned estate.

Backed by a sound bed from Daniel Marcus Clark, their voices weave together in a tapestry of words, humming and cries. Some of the most exciting moments are when they run over each other and you can just hear snatches of phrases.

Not all the lines zing as much as they could but like the "two copper coins, two amber suns" of a fox's eyes, some gleam. If you haven't got on board London's spoken word bus yet, it's about time you did.