For the fourth year running — in a valuable contribution to Anglo-American cultural relations — a group of young actors from Western Washington University’s theatre arts department visited Chacombe, near Banbury, with a series of new short plays penned by members of the Northwest Playwrights Alliance.

In so doing, the six introduced Saturday’s audience at Sophie’s Barn (and a larger crowd on Monday at The Mill in Banbury) to entertainment in a refreshingly different style.

The seven ten-minute plays — some serious, some not — were welcome on one level for their celebration of the richness of the English language. On another, they reminded us of theatre’s remarkable ability to transport us out of ourselves — on this occasion to some pretty unusual destinations.

The brief meeting with its characters that each play afforded was a difficulty in this dramatic form admitted to by the players during a post-show discussion.

And just as they had a hard job quickly showing us who they ‘were’ and what they were doing, so audience members — this one at least — will have found it no easier to maintain, in most cases, a lasting memory of these passing acquaintances.

This is thus a review that necessarily eschews the usual naming of names, confining itself to expressing thanks to all involved for work very well done.