CUTBACKS. Austerity. Crisis? What crisis?, said Supertramp in 1975 and the artistic community of York in 2014.

This city is flourishing in its arts scene like never before, despite the changing of the guard at the city council, where science is the golden goose and arts is a four-letter word.

How does York respond? By independent artists and creative visionaries putting on more and more shows, gigs and exhibitions; setting up film festivals; creating boutique cinemas and upgrading venues; opening arty cafe bars; and presenting plays in pubs and even shops.

Or, in the case of Greg and Ails McGee at According To McGee, welcoming Mathew Wignall’s new theatre project, Off The Rock Productions, to their white-cube back room for four nights of The Five Seasons. One writer, one sound designer, five plays, five directors, 14 actors, 25 seats.

The seating capacity is still a tight squeeze with little room for actors, just a strip at the front and an aisle, minimal props and one white chair. All very Samuel Beckett, or more precisely a retro re-flowering of German Expressionism, the short-lived 20th century theatre movement that gave Realism and Naturalism the red card.

In turn, Wignall reacts to the repressive, constrictive realities of modern life in five short plays that elide into each other and finish back where they started with The Man (Mick Liversidge), awoken by his alarm, disorientated, and wondering who he is. Groundhog day, again.

“I wanted to explore the way in which external forces, be they the repressive legislation of a totalitarian regime or suffocating social conventions, act upon individual will,” said Wignall in his writer’s notes to The Press.

“It is still a painfully depressing fact that one’s gender, ethnicity, social class, learning ability, nationality or, to put it more succinctly, accident of birth, will do much to shape the opportunities, or indeed lack of, that pervade a person’s life.”

Big subjects, little plays, form a cycle from spring to winter and on to renewal, the fifth season where hope springs a leak. Wignall calls his unruly bunch of five vignettes “dark, fantastical pieces” with comedy at their heart, and this comedy is of the absurd variety, the very hardest to play because it can throttle laughter at awkward birth.

Nevertheless, the likes of Liversidge, Anna Rose James, Matt Pattison, Gemma Curry and Sarah Cotterill all rally to Wignall’s cause, and Wignall himself stars in the best short as his Mr Z and Teej Jackson’s Mr X compete desperately to fail invigilator Anna Rogers’s test for a job neither wants: the ridiculous and the sublime in tandem.

In keeping with individual will fighting back, Wignall hands over each play to a different director – Wignall himself, debutant James J Osman, Anna-Siobhan Lewis, Tom Straszewski and Sarah Cotterill – and each brings a distinctive seasoning to the seasons of this strange yet disturbingly familiar world.

After seasons to be fearful, parts one to five, Off The Rock will return in 2015 with another Wignall work, An Interview In The Afterlife. Meanwhile, the arts are very much alive in York.