There are moments in Discombobulate that are as shambolic as an amateur production of Waiting for Godot. This evening of spoken word and comedy is a seat-of-the-pants affair. But when it clicks - as it often does when authors of the calibre of Alan Bissett, Liz Lochhead, Alasdair Gray and Bernard MacLaverty are involved - it's easy to see why it plays to a full house at the Arches every month.
Discombobulate was started two years ago by Ian MacPherson, a Dublin comedian, and his girlfriend Magi Gibson, the recently appointed makar (official poet) of Stirling. They enlisted the help of their friend Bissett, a regular performer. Sometimes the Glaswegian chanteuse Christine Bovill sings. It's not unusual to see the playwrights Douglas Maxwell and Iain Heggie performing scenes from their latest works.
MacPherson came to Glasgow after tiring of London's comedy scene a few years ago. He says Gibson came up with the idea for Discombobulate, as much to get him out of their west-end flat as anything.
"For me, in the 1990s, comedy went into a very mainstream and commercial sphere, which didn't suit me as much," he says.
"The idea with Discombobulate was that comedy tends to be seen as low-brow and poetry at the other end of the spectrum. As far as I'm concerned, it's either good or bad. I wanted to have an evening where there are different art forms on the stage, cross-fertilising - just to see what happens. More often than not, it works."
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The performers are paid little more than expenses, which means MacPherson is limited when trying to recruit authors. But it helps him keep the price of admission low and the event feel fresh and innovative. "I'd say 90 per cent of the line-up is Scottish and that says a lot about the amount of talent that's within our reach," he says.
This month MacPherson had the former Booker prize nominee Sarah Hall on the same bill as MacLaverty, Bissett, Bovill and Ryan Van Winkle, the Scottish Poetry Library's reader in residence. Two hours flew by.
For Bissett, Discombobulate is a chance to interact with the audience. "With most book festivals you are wheeled on and wheeled off and then you speak to somebody for 30 seconds at a signing afterwards," he says. "With this it's as much a social thing as it is about literature."
Moreover, says Bissett, without Discombobulate we would never have seen him in a dress in his one-woman show, The Moira Monologues. "It's helped me to become comfortable with performing," he says. "That show only came about because I was able to test the material at Discombobulate."
Bissett, whose change from shy writer to flamboyant thespian is a revelation, thrives on the unpredictability of it all: "We want it to feel a bit rock'n'roll. Everybody has been to all sorts of live readings where they are just bored."
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But the key to enjoying Discombobulate is knowing that it could all go wrong - that Alasdair Gray might wander off in search of his notes, or that MacPherson might make an inappropriate joke about the Cumbrian floods before being saved by the gentle prose of the Cumbrian author Hall. The audience takes it in their stride.
"The audience are lovely; they know to expect new things and they are not expecting a certain level of slick professionalism," says MacPherson. "When everything goes wrong but in a funny way it goes right, and with really good people, that's what you're hoping for."
Discombobulate is on the first Tuesday of the month at The Arches, Glasgow