Brighton Festival Associate Company Vincent Dance Theatre present two re-staged shows as part of the ongoing 21 Years/21 Works project documenting and celebrating their work since the company’s inception in 1984. Look at Me Now, Mummy was originally created in 2008; and Underworld in 2012. Audiences could choose whether to see them as two separate shows, or together in one programme.

Look At Me Now, Mummy is a solo performance set in a messy yet quite clinical looking kitchen. Up to her ears in domestic equipment; liquidiser, microwave/cooker etc, with hair pulled back into a tight bun, tired looking, yet remaining elegant and graceful, is something of a yummy mummy who bit by bit loses her ability to keep it all together. There’s lengths of polythene that waft in the breeze of an electric fan, beautiful music merges into radio static. This isolated woman is passing her time, experimenting with the bits and bobs that surround and entrap her. She plays at holding a baby that then gets shoved into the table top cooker. She’s discombobulated, between panicking and soothing herself and entertaining herself with roleplaying the part of a new mother, a role she hasn’t the script for. Candles are lit, balloons pop, paper is set alight and extinguished in a saucepan of water. I find her a bit tiresome, don’t care about her, the audience chuckles and appear riveted by her odd behaviour. Incidentally some mothers in the audience have real babes in arms, and are discreetly asked to leave when their babies become a little vocal! Our protagonist sings a strained version of Back to Black, and becomes increasingly distressed, flings about a chair and a saucepan, calms herself. She appears forsaken. A soul seeking redemption and comfort. In exhausted near derangement, she pisses on the floor and screams in simulated childbirth. At once very bare, and at the same time theatrical, I wasn’t that bothered about the character, yet the performance took a turn and I was surprised and appreciative by the end. With classical music now on the radio, the scene changes to something disturbing – on her back, legs akimbo, with a kitchen knife across her bare belly, swamped by the debris and detritus about her, she screams, and prepares for an auto caesarian, she screams more, as she drops the knife and rolls onto her side, her outcry transmutes into a newborn babies cry and she’s suddenly silenced, recollects herself, gathers together herself and the strewn about bunting. I’m left with a vivid visceral portrait of a new mum struggling to cope.

Underworld is an ensemble piece. Row upon row of church chairs. Shadows, as if in a nocturnal cathedral. The atmosphere and lighting is striking, cinematographic. Figures come in and out of light. Various pairings and perpetual partings. One man sobs, a woman screams. Looking skyward, they are contained in this all-encompassing ecclesiastical prison, and they themselves are containers of sorrows. They fold and unfold themselves. Hands in prayer. Hysterical laughing. Leaping over chairs, forming and reforming. They are patient, as composed as they can be. What vessels are these? Resigned to their relentless searching for place and peace. These straining souls bending and creasing their limbs, as if swimming and forever suspended in their sorrows and anticipation of an eternal pain, frantic reassembling of chairs. However much they attempt to shift their space, they are trapped. Frenetic scurrying, all chairs shifted and lifted into a pyre. The storm passes and clears. Games are played, rituals constructed to pass the time. Magnificently lit and energetically performed, an intensely physical ensemble theatre, Underworld, based on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. is riveting for a while, a monochrome and athletically performed spectacle, yet after the first hour, I SO wanted the gloom to lift for some form of lighter reprieve. It was glorious in a Tarkovsky kind of way, yet became relentlessly beautifully gloomy. The audience shifted around a lot. Many left. At 2 hours and twenty minutes, with no interval or let up of this gloomy claustrophobic place, the audience was incredibly restless. I imagine that when the piece was originally created for the longest, darkest, filthiest of the dark arches under Leeds Railway Station in 2012, it would have worked superbly as a durational live performance for an unconventional space, but as a sit-down theatre work it felt relentless. Those bells! Even the beautifully composed soundscape got on my nerves. My companion told me that he had lost the will to live – sadly and frustratingly, we both felt like humans trapped and suspended in this theatre, desperate to move on and out to a breath of fresh air.

An exuberant audience of children frolic in the pre-show holding area. The performance is taking place in a very smart room (the Ambassador Suite) within the Hilton Metropole hotel, on Brighton seafront. For now, we wait to be led in to witness the legendary French company Velo Theatre present From the bottom of the well, the frog believes the sky is round. The moment to enter their magical mechanical world of wonder and enchantment comes: all coats and bulky bags of our everyday lives are to be left behind, and we expectantly file through, along a kind of canvas corridor, and through a canvas door, in the style of a 3D drawing. I manage to trip, and bring part of this fabric set with me. I’m embarrassed, and attract the consternation of the three smartly dressed male performers. I shuffle off to sit red-faced and a little indignant on one of the tightly packed wooden forms. I request a drink from the tea-pot in the shape of a house that is being offered to a few members of the audience. I’m successful, though this refreshment is lemonade, not a proper cuppa. I want a nibble of a wafer biscuit too, cut into the shape of a house.

Once we’re all settled, and the set is intact, the story commences – the tale of a monsieur who had 400 houses, some huge and others so tiny they are made of pins and disappear when the light changes, yet none that give him satisfaction. A mechanical bird flies from a cuckoo clock and delivers a note to the authoritative man in the kilt sitting high above us in the umpire chair. There’s a sudden black-out, and an audible kerfuffle in the ensuing darkness. When the lights resume, we are in awe to find that the space has opened up before us into a large and lofty room, with a decorative ceiling. Very grand, and visually arresting. In the open space is a spinning world. A young man cycles in, an older portly lady peruses the terrain.

There follows a wonderful use of space and expert visual storytelling. The setting of scenes is just astounding. Contents of the room are brought in; lamps covered in cloths, window frames, straight lines are sanded onto the floor with a sand dispenser to denote the rooms. Everything about this show is simply gorgeous, a riveting, engrossing and enchanting visual feast topped with captivating storytelling. The physicality is superb, for example, a choreography with pillows. The pace and detailed design exemplary. It’s just glorious, enchanting, riveting, transportive. So beautifully created, I didn’t want to leave. I could be wrapped in this world forever and a day.

This was a show billed for the younger audience, yet it was a complete enchantment for me, a fully-grown adult with no child in tow! From the very beginning, I was enraptured by puppeteer and shadowgrapher Drew Colby, both by his performance persona and by his mind-boggling ability to create extraordinarily animated hand-shadows. I had to keep referring back to see if this really wasn’t the true shadow of someone’s profile, or a bird, or a mischievous rabbit.

Inspired by the animal tales of Aesop and La Fontaine, involving live music (harmonica) and song – and just Colby’s fingers and thumbs – Small Fables is a one-man show of exceptional charm, humour and virtuosity. Spellbound, I found myself gasping in delight. We witness small yet bold encounters such as a rabbit innocently attempting to eat some grass, perpetually interrupted every time he tries to sing his song. Other fables feature encounters between an extraordinary number of different hand-shadow animals, including mice, hares, tortoises, foxes, crows, grasshoppers, frogs, lions and wolves.

A scene that had the sold-out audience squealing and screaming was his interpretation of the nursery rhyme/song There was an Old Lady who Swallowed a Fly. It was just extraordinary. Drew Colby has such fantastic timing, and a brilliant deadpan dialogue with the audience. The images he creates are both humorous and intricate, often poetic, with an aesthetic that reminds me of Russian animator Yuri Norstein. Some fables have a pre-recorded soundscape, others are characterfully narrated live.

A fistful of finger-tastic fantasy, Drew Colby’s storytelling exists in a world created with absences of light and simple lightscapes, such as a torch illuminating the bottom of a jam jar,  the near phantasmagorical result projected onto the full-moon shaped screen. He creates theatre out of thin air: the timing, blending and melding of one creature into another, the depth and lifelikeness he can create is mindblowing. At the end of this hugely transportative show, in wonderment I had to go request that he showed me his hands – just to check that he didn’t have extra fingers…