Theatre Re are a young French-English company exploring corporeal mime to tell stories that walk the tightrope between fantasy and reality. In The Little Soldiers the apparent setting is a circus, figured by a string of pendant tungsten bulbs draped attractively across a stage peopled by three grease-painted archetypes of silent movie styled commedia. The air of a nostalgic celluloid world is enhanced by the live score mixed and performed by Alex Judd who weaves and loops keyboard, violin and vocal riffs into an absorbing and near continuous sound track.

The story is also archetypal: two performing brothers (perhaps magicians, perhaps acrobats, the company don’t seem interested in concretising their world) compete for the affections of a suitably disdainful yet flirtatious ballerina. The competition is readily metaphorical and imagistic – the world already exists in this language – and the ballerina’s tightrope is, after all, simply a power cable to the microphone stretched taut across the ground. More often than not the brothers vie for the ‘real’ trappings of the stage – its spotlight (a very effectively manipulated lantern on wheels), microphone, or centre-stage stepladder. This resonates with the company’s aim to blur inner dreams with illusion by playing with actual on-stage realities in a poor theatre aesthetic to create their images. It’s a language that establishes a stylish melee of shifting scenarios – a chase, a cliff-top fall, an underwater world – that rise and fall, but it also has the effect of removing consequence and weight from their storytelling.

Placing jealously and competition at the heart of the story demands some investment in character for the mime to move beyond slapstick, but more often than not I found myself lost in the interplay of images and unable to invest in the characters or their world. The lines defining fantasy and reality were never drawn precisely enough to support effective play with them as the show developed. There are many interesting ideas being explored here and a great deal of detail in the performances, though the movement languages weren’t always as crisp as they could have been, but I longed for a little more rigour in their application. Where were the audience situated in this circus staging, for example? What was the trigger for the jealously to develop into rage? Theatre Re are a company with clearly developed craft in their mime work, but in order to tell a story that’s satisfying as well as beautiful, the theatre strand of their work also needs to be crafted.

‘Host’ is one of those delicious words whose multiple meanings sit, humming, in tension with one other, creating a delicious mental paradox. Both intimate, generous even, and legion, slightly threatening, its abstract use in the project’s title leaves all possible meanings in suspension. As if what exactly the project is to become has yet to be inhabited.

The HOST project marks a new beginning for Brighton’s cherished Nightingale Theatre team. Since their ejection from their pub theatre premises earlier this year, the organisation will now look for alternative models through which to present the best new performance work, underpinned by the belief that ‘theatre can happen anywhere.’ In this inaugural production under the HOST banner written by local artist Tim Crouch, it is difficult to imagine a closer knit connection of subject to form.

Closed into a wooden bathing machine, the buzz of Brighton’s shopping street New Road is abruptly muffled and all that remains is the other individual sitting waiting for you at a simple table. They start to read. They speak directly to you. They plead, they question. They have strong ideas. They look you in the eye. The text is simple and immediate, though you remain (largely) silent, your presence absolutely necessary – it’s a conversation, if one sided. The exchange peaks in intensity, packed with ideas and provocations about relationships, connections, and our responsibilities to our partners, to others. And then they leave. You are left with the script, a moment’s breathing space and then a new stranger arrives to sit opposit. Now you speak and they listen.

In a five minute piece it’s perhaps inevitable that some of the ideas feel a little underdeveloped. The strand about tradition and continuity felt like it called for some greater possibility for deviation or change. But in such a short exchange it’s difficult both to set up the rules and establish the possibility of their being broken. And in this confident opener Crouch’s gift is in making the name of the game so simple and clear than you never feel discomfited by the unusual set up: you can relax, inhabit and enjoy. And the overwhelming gift of this free show is its extraordinary potency as an experience, immediately intimate and arresting, appealing to all of our inner actors. HOST raises all kinds of intriguing questions about the nature of performance, as well that as of art as exchange, and the inspection of art and life. With relay performances set to continue outwith the festival, as well as new commissions yet to be developed as the Nightingale continues its flight to a new home, it will be fascinating to see what other innovations and ideas this project is set to bring to the table.

Young company Sparkle and Dark have been creating and touring puppetry-led visual theatre since 2009. Their work has followed an interesting trajectory, moving from the sort of fantastical storytelling that is puppetry’s natural habitat into more serious subjects: 2012’s The Girl with No Heart tackled the impact of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from a child’s point of view. Killing Roger, which started life through the Little Angel’s increasingly influential artists’ development programme last year, continues this trend by exploring assisted suicide.

Any story tackling issues of death and dying is a gift for puppetry, with its innate aptitude for portraying physical decline and, of course, what we might term the in-animation of death itself. In addition, the theme of ageing also opens up some strong puppetry metaphors: increased reliance on others, a sort of alienation from the body as it changes, that are powerfully identifiable. The company mine these possibilities in a very well developed performance, at its strongest when attacking one of the fundamental questions of puppetry on stage – who the puppeteers are and why they are there. Shared between three performers, the moments of passing the animation of human-scale puppet Roger between them become very rich comments on identity and caring that are clever and moving.

The company have developed a sort of heightened realism: the space is dominated by the cluttered arrangement of Roger’s sitting room-cum-kitchen, whilst the rest of the stage works more metaphorically through thoughtful lighting design and simple props. Objects on stage are charged and unwieldy: making a cup of tea becomes a Herculean task (commenting perhaps on the realities of disabled living as well as building into the puppet logic). This real / poetic dramaturgy is also manifest in the writing which switches between real exchanges within scenes and the central character Billy’s conflicted comments on the above. This allows for useful zooming in on key moments as the relationship develops, but can sometimes feel overwritten and Billy overwrought. It’s true that he has been through a traumatic event – and the eponymous act is shocking despite the certainty with which we know it’s coming – but placing most of the storytelling at this pitch is wearing after a while and starts to flatten out the material, making it feel more one-note than it really is. Sequences where we encounter more unadulterated storytelling – Roger’s memories for example – come as a relief.

The puppetry is strong and detailed, with excellent voice work rendering Roger fully believable and accessible, and the company are doing good work in pushing puppetry into new, less obvious territories and for new audiences. But, as it’s new, there’s still more to discover, and in this darkest of stories, I longed for a little more light and shade to add shape to the storytelling and to allow us to relax a little more in Billy’s world and make a show that really entertains whilst it innovates.

Housing, especially here in the south east, is currently a national obsession. The premise of The House Project, which draws together sociological and economic research about housing use in Brighton with drama, feels not only timely but almost pathologically compelling. An estate agents’ tour of the sort of grand old villa in Brighton that these days would likely be fractured into bedsit living pods appeals to all the vicarious pleasures of shopping through property porn.

This framing device has been well thought through and developed: we are greeted outside the house by two deliciously smarmy estate agents in a front yard bristling with sale boards that seem to have wildly proliferated like the visible symptoms of a national epidemic. They expertly divide and and regroup the audience, taking us on two intertwining tours of the property, taking in six different performance spaces and guided by a map on the back of our programmes which outlines the year and character we will be watching.

It’s a clever device to set the scenes across time periods, giving us the chance to meet the house’s inhabitants in the 70s, 90s and the present day, and opening up space for commentary about changes in the ways houses are used by families, and also for an effective jigsaw-like story of family history for us to piece together. The scenes are structured as long form improvisations, or perhaps they have only been developed that way. In any case we encounter what seem only to be sections of interactions before being moved on by our estate agent guides: this effectively gives the atmospheric illusion of ghosts of action running continuously through the house, of which we glimpse only parts. However it also means that scenes feel very loose and formless: there is a sense of performers trying to hit lines of exposition but as naturalism it feels overextended and flabby: I watched a long scene of two characters sleeping in bed and at times the audience are left with not enough to go on or to hold us. Considering the amount of time we spend with each character – at least 10 minutes or so in every scene – there is far more we could have discovered about them to add depth and interest as individuals beyond the immediate story we are being invited to look at. The piece would have benefited from working with a writer.

The show has been created by the Brighton Laboratory, a Continuing Professional Development hub for local theatre makers to work together, and its form bears the hallmarks of a process-led exploration. There are many different languages at play here – some more effectively used than others – including dramatic improvisation, dance, installation (a nice room of dolls houses menacing and tripping up the young mother in the attic rooms, though hampered by tricky sight lines), some thoughtful use of technology (with live-feed camera work helping to magnify some of the very understated TV-style acting) and, unexpectedly, absurdist direct address from a maid character who asks us to consider the first world problems of housing (and other issues) in the UK. I enjoyed the thoughtfulness that had gone into the ideas behind the production but there is more work needed still to develop the audience’s journey through these different languages and spaces, and to create scenes of greater depth and complexity.