The inaugural year of National Theatre Wales included an immensely ambitious body of work which tested to the limit the definition of what a national theatre can and should be. In new venues and old, found spaces and open spaces, it staged several freshly created plays, some retrieved ones, as well as adaptations, devised pieces and, in Aeschylus'sThe Persians, the oldest play of all. The year was capped at Easter by the widely hailed The Passion of Port Talbot starring Michael Sheen. Now NTW has announced its second season and it looks to be just as boundary-pushing as the first.

Persecuted Burmese freedom fighter Aung San Suu Kyi may be this year’s guest director, provoking a loose theme of "freedom of expression, liberty, and the power of the individual voice" that’s all the more powerful for her enforced absence. But a week in to the 2011 Brighton Festival and Brighton Festival Fringe, I’d say it’s the stewards who are this year’s under-sung heroes and heroines. As the craze for interactive performance burgeons, the tricky task is falling to them of reassuring wary audiences without giving the creative game away. Would there be room for a rucksack in Small Space? Would the Minotaur-themed edible narrative be suitable for vegetarians? And what would happen if the polite woman with the nervous laugh decided she’d rather not touch the performer of An Appreciation’s genitals? (She did, in the end, but more of that later…)

Bradford, once the worsted capital of the world, now employs fewer than 1,000 workers in the textile industry. Some of the disused mills have been transformed into tourist attractions – nearby Salts Mill has a huge collection of artwork by David Hockney and a posh bistro. Drummonds Mill has lain silent since closure, to be reopened temporarily for Freedom Studios’ production of The Mill – City of Dreams. Drummonds Mill is just north of the city centre. It’s a huge hulk of a building. You step carefully over the cobbles, and weeds, before being directed in through a back door by smiling security guards. The mill originally opened in 1862, closing for the last time in 2002. At the entrance, a huge banner announces that luxury flats are under development.

Dave is a bomb, waiting to go off. He’s dangerous because he seems so ordinary. Late-twenties, he’s nothing much to look at. He wears a suit. Works as a civil servant in some absurdly obscure government department. No girlfriend. If truth be told, a bit of a piss-head really. But the thing that makes him dangerous is that - as the title of DC Moore’s 2010 play makes clear - he fancies himself as a truth-teller. He’s painfully honest, and, worse, he uses honesty as a weapon. So when you meet him in a pub, watch out.

There is no consensus about what site-specific theatre actually constitutes. Does it grow organically out of the space in which the theatre piece is performed, and can therefore be staged nowhere else? Or is it no more than any theatre piece which happens away from the constricting formality of the thrust stage or the proscenium arch?

Many people use that weaselly phrase about Antony Gormley, saying he “divides the critics”. For the most part this is not true: for the most part the critics loathe Gormley’s work. They suggest he is either a bad figurative sculptor masquerading as a conceptual artist, or a bad conceptual artist masquerading as a figurative sculptor. This is really just a whinge that he doesn’t fit in a box, but so what?

Imagine a future, a near future, in which gangs of teenage boys roam the deserted streets of the metropolis, selling hallucinatory butterflies and organising parties in squats for rich clients who have extreme tastes in sexual abuse. Imagine. This is the vividly conceived sci-fi world of Philip Ridley’s Mercury Fur, first staged in 2005 and now revived in an old London office block by the thrilling fringe company Theatre Delicatessen.