Limited Editions at The Shed In this column last week, Bernadette McNulty raved about Home, a documentary about a hostel for the homeless, staged in The Shed - a simple timbered building that has popped up outside the National Theatre to function as a temporary replacement for the defunct Cottesloe, which re-opens as the Dorfman next spring. As well as endorsing every word that Bernadette wrote about Home (grab any remaining tickets for its last performances this week), I'd now like to bring to your attention The Shed's next offer, which runs from September 9-21. Limited Editions will showcase five pieces presented and performed by groups working outside the traditional centres and formats and called jazzy things like Sleepdogs, The Wardrobe Ensemble and Still House. My insider tips would include The Bullet and the Bass Trombone (September 9-11), about an orchestra struggling to survive in a war zone, and Ours was the Fen Country (September 16-18), which explores a landscape and communities being destroyed by agri-business. Taken together, these pieces represent the future - or what one might call the R & D - of current theatre, offering snapshots of what's coming next as the vogues for site-specific, immersive and video-based aesthetics lose their force and originality to sink into cliché. Curating (another fashionable term) this season are The Shed's boss Ben Power and his producer Marianne Dicker, who have been trawling small venues hither and yond in search of genuine experiment and novelty. They tend to talk in terms of "theatre-makers" rather than playwrights, directors and designers, and they are evangelical believers in the collaborative nature of the creative process. "I'm not interested in the idea of someone sitting in a room writing something which is then handed over to someone else to direct," says Power. It needs to be much more fluid than that. We agree that on this basis the most significant figure in the theatre over the last 30 years isn't Tom Stoppard, Alan Bennett or David Hare, but the self-effacing Caryl Churchill, "someone who has always been out at the frontier, making new forms as well as tackling radical subjects." Power and Dicker feel that something Churchill's endeavours have pioneered is the breaching of the traditional barriers between art forms - a collapse exemplified in the way that Limited Editions shows will integrate dance and sound art into word and music. And this is now changing the face of popular theatre too, as the West End success of War Horse and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time suggests. A major adult box-office hit with a puppet as its central figure - I don't think that would have been possible 10 years ago. Do they feel that the possibilities of the magical-mystery-tour ghost-train folderol have now been exhausted? I think that sort of event needs to provide more than just a experience. It needs to engage the brain as well as the heart, and develop a theme rather than simply thrill your senses. The Shed is also a laboratory and testing-ground for the permanent new Dorfman, which will be much more "porous, transparent, rough around the edges" than the Cottesloe, promoting a new attitude to theatre-going, less committed to the idea of curtain up at 7.30 for a text-based play. The priority has to be attracting audiences from sections of society which currently find the theatre a closed shop, a drag or an irrelevance. Power and Dicker constantly look to the spontaneity and variety of the Edinburgh Fringe to see what other models might be viable. Of course, Edinburgh is different because people are mostly there on holiday and anything goes in a festival context, but there are lessons to be learnt. We need to be more flexible: kids go clubbing after midnight and city workers are in the gym at 6am - perhaps we should try breakfast theatre?