Ageing and dementia is one of the go-to topics for today’s theatre makers. Tomorrow, conceived and directed by Matthew Lenton in collaboration with a company of actors and designers, is a highly visual and emotive response. Over seventy minutes, we see lives transformed, moments remembered and lost, the everyday rubbed up against the mystical.

In the haunting opening scene, latex masks are gently passed along a production line; powdered, boxed and stored away. When the first mask is pulled over the head of protagonist George, and helplessly wrestled against, the effect is startling. He has gone from young man to old man and his physicality, and that of all the ‘old’ people in this mixed-age cast, is totally convincing.

The action switches between the reality of the nursing home, with its one comfy chair and standard lamp, and the dreamlike state of the patients’ inner world, their memories and concerns. They are caught in a time-loop, aware yet unaware.

Once or twice a group of children play about the elderly folk, like flashes of memory or a connection to the past. They act as carers, affectionate but distanced. Somehow they did not seem properly embedded into the whole and added little.

The piece is as much about the people caring as it is about their patients. We learn about their lives through snippets of conversation and workman-like banter. The juxtaposition of light conversation with the internal, aching longings of the patients is effective, but occasionally the text feels a bit false and the young nurse rather a caricature.

The lighting design by Kai Fisher is moody and beautiful and the stage design (Jamie Harrison) effectively simple. Two large open doorways suggest that no-one is trapped inside except in their minds and their memories. Snow falls, the clouds turn blue, all around is darkening and hushed. The sound-design, by Mark Melville, is pitched just right, occasionally rousing but mostly subtly underpinning the action.

Tomorrow, a multi-national co-production and Brighton Festival world premiere, does not say anything new or revelatory about care or dementia, but instead offers a conceptual exploration of these issues through painterly theatricality.

Zoo is the company of Swiss choreographer, dancer and performance maker Thomas Hauert, here in collaboration with four other European artists. Enhanced Dance to Disguised Music is a highly conceptual piece for the over-fives, matching the playful disjunction of John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano (1946-8) with a dancer similarly encumbered by a changing variety of costumes and objects.

Starting slowly, with a projection of the audience on the shrouded piano, a bulky Christo-style wrapped statue begins to sway, then shuffle and gradually disrobe. Beneath is the performer Mat Voorter, in a costume built from balloons and stockings. It looks and sounds extremely uncomfortable and his movement is continually hampered as he squelches around the floor. This theme of transformation continues through a range of other equally uncomely outfits, contriving to hinder the body’s versatility.

While Cage’s quirky and playful music provides a good counterpoint to the action, it remains tonally level throughout. The same can be said for the piece as a whole. The stated desire to have all the process and effort visible makes for a dull audience experience, particularly for children. It is fun when the long-johns become bulbous shapes or when sticks add a sense of danger, but it is less fun to watch these changes taking place in real time. It also means that there is little actual dance to speak of, more a stumbling over, round, and through things. The effort is palpable but it doesn’t make a very interesting stage picture.

When balloon and stocking creatures emerge from over the back wall, there is a sense of awe and beauty. They fill the space and have personality, until they too are taken apart, or popped. The lighting at this point (Jan Van Gijsel) is effective but could be more magical.

There is little interaction between pianist (Daan Vandewalle) and Mat Voorter. The pianist seems barely engaged with the piece at all. The audience is kept similarly distanced, which is unusual for a children’s piece. It lacked the emotional tug of, for example, Crying Out Loud’s L’Après-midi d’un Foehn, which creates such a real and moving world from plastic bags and wind-fans.

The well-behaved youngsters were rewarded with balloons at the end of show. Something at least to take away.

In the ancient Japanese picture-based story telling tradition, Kamishibai, the travelling tellers sold sweets to gather in an audience. For this Brighton Festival show, anyone who sat in the front row was given a lolly, one provocatively pre-sucked by the cheeky Chalk Boy (Glen Biderman-Pam). Chalk Boy acted as scene changer and entertainer, silent throughout, writing up introductory captions before each tale. First up, ‘Perverts, this one’s for you.’

Jemma Khan, performer and artist, lived in Japan for two years and trained with veteran Kamishibai artist Rokuda Genji. She was inspired to turn it into a contemporary form and teamed up with South African colleagues Gwydian Beynon (writer) Carlos Amata (artist) and director John Trengove. The Epicene Butcher is bang up to date with stories about the dream life of cats, Super Mario facing off turtles, the Fukushima earthquake and a version of Hentai (animated pornography) performed with hysterical girlish giggles.

The set-up is kept lo-fi and simple, as it would have been on the road in 1920s Japan – a wooden frame into which paintings are slotted and revealed as the story is told. Jemma Khan, dressed like a stereotypical Harajuku teenager, adopts different accents to suit each story. She has extremely clear pronunciation and a tone of voice that is easy on the ear. The form of presentation doesn’t change over the fifty-five minutes so there is little element of surprise in the staging, apart from Chalk Boy’s louche interventions and an eclectic selection of music.

But the content, both visual and aural, is surprising and occasionally surreal. The drawings range from competent to beautiful. There are close-ups and landscapes and panoramas, some are like a comic strip, one is purely graphic and one has a touch of Hokusai. Gwydian Beynon, who has written several popular South African soap operas and TV dramas, is playful with words and has a brilliant grasp of the bizarre and gory. The story of the Epicene Butcher is a great piece of writing with gothic rhyming phrases.

Sightlines at the Dome Studio Theatre were not ideal for a piece that really needs to be seen head on, and from not too far away. A little knowledge of Japanese culture adds to the experience. Banzai!