Lucy Hopkins, last seen at Brighton Fringe provocatively swirling her red scarf in Le Foulard, wants to surprise her audience and herself. She is using her three shows in the Bosco to work out how and all are different. The performance that I see, on a blustery Sunday afternoon, has an audience small in number and height, as half are under 10.

Today the piece is site responsive from the start, with Lucy emerging worm-like from the beneath the seats. Surprise! She plays with the opportunities offered by the space: the light that comes and goes through cracks and ill-fitting doors, the wind rattling the rafters, and the creaky floor all allow her the chance to move and react and clown it up, saying nothing, using just her incredibly mobile body and brilliantly expressive face.

A hand-held lamp becomes a key prop, spotlighting people in the audience and herself. There is an extended riff on a small square of red shiny paper peeled from the floor. A child’s preoccupation with some elastic forms a running theme. These are simple pleasures performed with a huge measure of joy. She invites people to join her on stage to do very little but just be with her, or follow her dance moves, or lead her in theirs. A microphone is used for just a couple of throwaway lines ‘It’s nice to have a holiday isn’t it?’ she says, apropos of nothing.

There have been several stand-out clown-based shows in this Brighton Festival and Fringe – by Trygve Wakenshaw, Jody Kamali and Spymonkey for example – and Lucy holds her own with them all. Her look can switch from delight to daggers in a flash, she can be elegant and awkward, fallible and in control all at the same time.

When three game men join her on stage, holding their arms aloft, the piece takes flight. Lucy gambles around between them, shouting ‘forest of men – tell me what I am searching for’, almost questioning her creative process. Making a new show every time is a challenge for any artist. Hannah Ringham’s Free Show trod similar territory. For me, the forest of men, and the kids on Sunday afternoon, Lucy Hopkins’ Surprise Event surprised, and I look forward to seeing how it plays out in other venues, with other audiences.

At my girls’ grammar school, the English class of ’72 found DH Lawrence’s descriptions of ‘fecund loins’ and ‘butting haunches’ both hysterically funny and utterly disgusting. For Penny, a college student in The Wardrobe Ensemble’s hugely enjoyable show, Lady Chatterley is a role model, an emancipated woman who ‘wants it as much as he does.’ But Penny (Helena Middleton), like Lady C, is going to be rudely disappointed when her turn comes – or rather fails to.

1972 is a year on the cusp, adrift from the permissive, free-loving, mini-skirted swinging of the 60s and not quite yet embracing Glam Rock, let alone Punk. We have the Osmond vs Cassidy dilemma, flares and feather cuts, Edward Heath and the IRA. Thank goodness for David Bowie and Ziggy Stardust. He connects all the characters in The Future of Sex, providing a glimpse of hope that something special and exciting might happen in their lives. His is the music and persona that can carry them through their experiments in doing it.

But first, the journey to this awakening, introduced with flamboyant panache and a cry of ‘This is it!’ by Tom England’s exuberant Martin. He’s like Antony Sher’s The History Man, and will later seduce Penny with his poetry.

The set is a row of chairs against a patterned wall, a square of dance floor, and four microphones at the corners. Just off stage, composer and musician Tom Crosely-Thorne provides guitar backing, in loons resplendent with Union Jack inserts.

Characters are introduced, and while they are all archetypes, they have idiosyncrasies enough to make them singular and memorable. Their thoughts and actions are described from outside the performance space – ‘This is Antony. His friends call him Tony’ – making the play unfurl like a novel and assimilation of detail easy. Within minutes we know that Christine (Kerry Lovell) is going to struggle to commit to losing her virginity, that gawky Anna (Jesse Meadows) will fall for the seductive Tessa (Emily Greenslade) and patient Rich (Ben Vardy) won’t get to play in a band.

Storylines overlap and the action is seamless, with beautifully choreographed movement and properly integrated music and songs. As the different relationships begin to unbuckle, the pace increases until clothes are ripped off and, in some unflattering swimmies, the sexually liberated teens dash about until exhausted then lie panting on the floor. How was it for you? If all this sounds hugely jolly, it is, but not at the expense of some more serious contemplation. The women in particular find contradictions in the way they are expected to behave; The Female Eunuch is telling them one thing, Linda Lovelace in Deep Throat another. For Antony ‘he calls himself Anton’ (James Newton) gender is more problematical and he finds solace dressing in his mother’s clothes. Tessa and Anna will meet decades later and be disappointed in each other. Christine’s parents’ loveless marriage will disintegrate. Germaine Greer will upset a generation of feminists. Today’s youth may have different reference points and, in Western Europe, a more permissive society, but the same pressures and concerns about sex remain.

The Wardrobe Ensemble’s work, including previous piece Riot (2011), has been rightly praised and they are certainly one of the most accomplished and original companies I’ve seen for a while. Proving, yet again, the city of Bristol’s key role in the development and support of young performers.

As a flashback to a decade that saw me trying desperately to blow-dry my curls into Farah Fawcett flicks, reading Jackie and riding an orange Chopper, The Future of Sex offers focus and fun. The clothes are just right, the haircuts slightly less so, and, if we never said ‘chill’ or ‘hanging out’, I was still right there, with the Spacehopper, the high-waisters, and the awkward fumblings. A very satisfying hour.

Brighton Festival and the HOUSE Festival of visual arts are both themed around ideas of home and place this year, and Catherine Ireton extends the theme to the Brighton Fringe, in a pleasing convergence of festival activity.

Leaving Home Party is a song cycle that explores what it’s like to leave your verdant, comfortable but restrictive home, in this case Limerick, and move somewhere new, such as Edinburgh. Not a huge leap geographically, or culturally, but for a young Catherine in 2005 it was a journey and experience that disturbed her soul.

Catherine uses her pure, lilting voice in a series of songs that tell her story factually while building an emotional landscape; there is a touch of Mary Hampton in the delicacy of her compositions. Using the Chinese buvu flute and hulusi pipes, along with a bodhran and Indian shruti box, accompanist Ignacio Agrimbau hints at Irish folk in a rich palette of sounds. He is very much a partner in the piece and it puzzles me, as with Groomed, that the on-stage performer isn’t introduced to us until the end of the show; to acknowledge him early would sit easily with the conversational form used here. The show was first performed at the Edinburgh Fringe 2014, directed by Caroline Byrne, and this pared down, simple staging, with just some back-wall projections, focuses attention on the performers, the limited range of movement fitting the narrative.

We do not get much detail as to what exactly happened in the four or so years Catherine spent in the UK. She leaves us hungry to know more about the boyfriends, the jobs, and her family. Instead she evokes a sense of what the Portugese call saudade and the Greeks nostalgos: a deep longing for home. The differences in Irish and British terminology initially wrong-foot her, the free contraception astounds her – ‘they’re practically encouraging it!’

Catherine sees her life as a circle, and the form of the piece is circular too; a circle that keeps to a level plane rather than a roller-coaster. I’d have liked a few more bumps. The songs loop and refrains repeat, keeping the story fluid.

The show comes to life in a song about her great-grandmother, a bold, adventurous woman who travelled the world but died ten miles from where she was born in Ireland. Catherine feels adrift having just crossed the North Sea. She knows that her passivity is not an asset and criticizes herself for it; ‘I put my plans in other people’s hands,’ she sings. She makes the point that the simplest of things can change a course of action; in her case, a mobile phone contract, a fairly universal observation. The main message from the piece, that home is where you are now, is not profound, but it is heartfelt.

Catherine is an assured performer with bags of charm and a voice that can take you places. If Leaving Home Party lacks the punch and originality of Buddug James Jones’s Hiraeth it’s an enjoyable journey nonetheless, and worthy of a home-coming party.

Four women want to reach the sublime and they’ll try anything to get there: happy-clappy songs, fractured didactic arguments, and chair balancing. Theirs is both a philosophical journey, taking in Burke and Nietzsche, and a theatrical one, involving every possible performance style and form in its exhaustive quest for the mountain top. They puncture the action with a meta-refrain of ‘This isn’t working, let’s try something else!’

What looks and feels like a piece grown from a devising workshop, is in fact written and directed by University of Cologne Lecturer Richard Aczel.  He questions, ‘How, in an age that wobbles between apocalyptic pathos and brain-dead boredom, can we still hit the dizzy heights of the sublime?’ but the text and staging lack the necessary focus to engage us fully. ‘We’ve hit the end of irony!’ an actor exclaims, before I’d had chance to register any irony at all.

A dizzying, choppy piece then, with shifts of tone and content that make you question what you are seeing. Perhaps that’s the point, but the Port in Air troupe struggles to communicate such complex ideas through this frenetic mix of movement, text, songs, and games.  The four young women work hard and with commitment; they have a great deal of physical action to get through. A set built from white chairs is constantly rearranged – it’s effective but over played – whilst the lighting design is well above usual Fringe standards. The main singer’s pretty voice weaves songs through the show providing welcome moments of reflection.

Because the actors don’t own the material, the performances are occasionally uneasy and at odds with their on-stage personalities. When the text slips into German, it becomes more fluid and words are allowed to settle. As an ensemble there is a disparity in the quality of performance and some text delivery is tonally uninteresting.  When three hunky men take the stage (audience shills) it only adds to the confusion; their performances seem to spring from another play altogether.  I’m all for ambition on stage and in literature, and the writer and company are certainly going for it full blast, but despite some strong stage pictures, and two engaging performers, there are too few rewards.

As it was, this audience member left the show still at base camp, nowhere near the mountain.