The snappily-titled solo show Call Me If You Feel Too Happy offers a refreshingly light-hearted look at life with bi-polar disorder.

Call Me If You Feel Too Happy, Sweet Teviot Star rating ***
The Bang Gang, Zoo Southside Star rating **
Borderline, Underbelly Star rating ****

The snappily-titled solo show Call Me If You Feel Too Happy offers a refreshingly light-hearted look at life with bi-polar disorder. Laura might have hoped that international travel would broaden her mind, but after experiencing the 2004 tsunami first-hand she plunged into depression and ended up in the Priory. Here she was given an explanation for the extreme swings from elation to misery that had characterised her teens.

It wasn't all bad news; she was now in the company of Stephen Fry, Winston Churchill and that woman from Star Wars - but the celebrity endorsements didn't compensate for the feeling that she'd wasted years of her life and now didn't know who she really was. Sophie Pelham gives a beguiling solo performance in this honest, autobiographical show, co-written with Nicola Albon, which provides an optimistic account of dealing with a feared and often misunderstood condition.

There's not a lot of optimism - or indeed subtlety - to The Bang Gang, in which a trio of patients in a mental hospital find their usual doctor replaced by one who practises therapy based around musical of the stage and screen. Lee Mattison's rather crass play earns plenty of easy laughs from a Karen Carpenter-obsessed anorexic, a pyromaniac victim of child sexual abuse and a traumatised fantasist who reckons she's brawled with Drew Barrymore and appeared in Bedknobs and Broomsticks. The pace is lively and the cast are game - Sean Wildey as the unambiguously unhinged doctor is reminiscent of a young, madcap Bill Murray - but the premise is so outrageous from the outset that the piece sidesteps any sort of exploration of "relevant social issues" of the kind mentioned in the mission statement of the presenting Bad Fox Theatre Company.

"When does madness become funny?" asks Rob Benson in one of the opening lines of his poetic monologue, Borderline, before pondering whether recreational drugs cause psychosis or merely act as a catalyst for underlying mental health problems. Whatever the answer, schizophrenia has destroyed the life of the character we follow from his days popping pills and spacing out to spending landmark birthdays on a mental ward and preparing for the apocalypse with defeated fellow patients. Benson was inspired to write the piece after witnessing the mental decline of friends who were once recreational drug users, but there's no heavy-handed "just say no" message here and no denial of the pleasure of a temporary escape from reality.

What makes this piece a bit special is that the account is told in a lyrical style that echoes the rhythms of the music that was integral to 1990s drug culture - a rave remix of some choice extracts is even played as the audience leaves. Towards the end the rhyming becomes less hypnotic and more predictable, but this is nonetheless an impressive work from an extremely talented writer and performer.