Berlin (who come from Belgium, not Germany!) are known to Total Theatre for their previous UK appearance with the complex and intriguing Land’s End, seen at the Brighton Festival 2012 – part large-scale installation, part film, and part live performance. That show investigated the life and crimes of a town that was sited on the border of France and Belgium, with one house dissected into two nationalities.

Bonanza, a far smaller scale work, is another part of what is a trilogy of shows investigating various takes on small-town mentality – shows which have a definite nod in the direction of the work of David Lynch in their eerie dissection of seemingly ‘normal’ people and landscapes. Unlike Land’s End, this piece features no live performers (unless you count the off-stage technician).

The show caused consternation amongst some audience members and critics who saw it as documentary film rather than ‘theatre’, so let’s just settle this by saying that actually it was neither – it was a piece of time-based live art. It is a piece of fixed duration, set in a theatre space, rather than a wander-in-and-out affair. The audience face a stage dressed with five screens squared up to five projectors and, set on a tilted platform above them, a model village of little wood cabins lit by twinkling lights.

This village – nay, town – is Bonanza, Colorado. Population: seven permanent residents who live in five houses (so one screen per household, lined up under the model of their house) plus there’s a few people who own summer houses, making a voting population of 14. It’s an extraordinary piece of work that (like Land’s End) investigates the weirdness beneath the surface of everyday life. It has resonances with Von Trier’s Dogville, although nothing quite as terrible happens here.

Nevertheless, Bonanza turns out to be a place filled with political and personal intrigue; a microcosm of how the world works. At the beginning, everything is hunky dory. We meet our residents, depicted on screen – sometimes one screen per house or tracking one person’s journey outside; sometimes all screens showing the same image; then again, a Google Earth zoom in from afar; or a still image of a desolate but beautiful landscape. At least, an image that is seemingly still: in one beautifully framed and held shot, a man and a dog are standing stock still in front of a copse of trees, and we suddenly notice that it isn’t a still, the dog’s tail is moving ever so slightly.

‘Don’t believe anything you hear and only half that you hear’ flashes up onscreen as a warning – what seems to be a simple story of simple country folk grows ever more complex and intriguing. Bird-watching, morning walks (‘I never wear a watch – it’s either sun up or sun down’), and Sunday prayers giving way to witchcraft rivalry (‘she works more on the astral plane than me’), vicious feuds with neighbouring town Pueblo, consorting with elves, cabin fever, illness, divorce, and political intrigue at the town board meeting at the Bonanza Fire House (we aren’t allowed in: the five screens show the same image of a shuttered door with murmurings behind it).

Paradise lost or hell on earth? The jury is out. A beautiful, haunting and troubling piece of work.

 Bonanza won a Total Theatre Award 2013 for Innovation, Experimentation and Playing with Form.

To the tune of Roy Orbison’s In Dreams our three performers enter the space – there’s Feidlim Cannon (actor, director and co-founder of Brokentalkers theatre company) playing himself, his mother Ann playing herself, and an actor (introduced as Alan) playing their psychotherapist Eric Keller and other roles. The absent character at the heart of the show is Sean Cannon, father of Feidlim, husband of Ann. What plays out over the next 75 minutes is a beautiful, disturbing, and inspiring exploration of bereavement, loss, and grief. For all the heartbreak presented, it is ultimately life affirming – and a marvellous example of how terrible, painful life events can be explored in a theatrically successful way. Be warned: you’ll be left Crying along with Roy as the cast take their bows…

We start with a ‘not very good’ (Feidlim’s words) piece of video art, in which he tries to capture something of Sean’s spirit by filming a glass of Guinness placed in various locations (pubs, parks) beloved of his father. We also learn pretty quickly that there is a second absent character in this story: Little Sean, the youngest son of the family, who died not long after birth. There’s some very lovely questioning of how memory and imagination intertwine as Feidlim tells us that he remembers being lifted up to peer through the glass window at the hospital nursery to see his new baby brother, and Ann tells us – and him – that this couldn’t have happened. Little Sean (and the surviving middle son, Pádraig) are represented onstage by life-size photos pasted onto cardboard cut-outs.

One of the lovely aspects of the show is the constant re-casting of people, objects, and images. Feidlim plays himself but sometimes speaks Ann’s words. Alan is mostly the psychiatrist, but later morphs into an eerily bandaged Sean Cannon. Pádraig’s recorded voice features later, and baby Sean is not only a cardboard cut-out but also a doll – a Chucky doll, says Feidlim in disgust, accusing his mother of morbidity in her choice of objects (the doll is inside a cardboard box, representing the child’s coffin, which Feidlim hates). The story of his father Sean’s unnecessary and ultimately fatal hospital operation is played out with one of those horrid Operation Rescue Kit boardgames. Photos, fake snow and balloons also feature…

Whilst the story is ostensibly about the deaths of Sean senior and junior and the bereavement process, what it turns out to be mostly about is the mother-son relationship. Through fantastically drawn detail, Ann is framed onstage (by Feidlim’s words, through her own words, and in her remarkable calm and focused physical presence) as a wonderfully complex character: a Reiki practitioner who loves the colour purple and Australian soap operas; and then again a traditional Irish Catholic mother who teaches her children to cross themselves when they pass a church and who puts holy water on batteries to revive them.

Feidlim meanwhile rants against the world – terrified that he’ll be viewed as a ‘fucking Norman Bates still living with me mam’ in his thirties, and still feeling the pain of his dad’s foolish promise to his eldest son that he’ll ‘never die’.

One of the really interesting aspects of the show is the interaction between the three different performance modes – here we have an actor-director using his own autobiographical material, a non-actor performing, and an actor playing real characters in the other two performers’ stories. It’s Quarantine’s Susan and Darren and then some.

It’s a weird thing, painful personal memoir (on page or stage). Once you decide to put it out there, then it becomes your art, not just your life – and you have to be willing to craft it in a way that makes it something other people can own too. Have I No Mouth does this very effectively – a brilliant show, a worthy winner of a Total Theatre Award 2013.

It starts pretty low-key, with dim lights and a mellow guitar tune (played live), then into an ensemble physical theatre scene – eight people and as many wooden stools acting out motifs of restraint, disorientation and unbalance. It revs up with the arrival of a crowd-rousing compere: ‘I said HELLO Edinburgh!’ who goes into a little rap on the Scots’ love of meat – meat with meat, even. It really takes off with the first of many satirical scenes that tell stories of terror and death whilst playing out harrowing visual metaphors of the human being treated as little more than meat. So in this scene, dubbed ‘strawberries and cream’, two executioners compare notes over the dinner table on their countries’ capital punishment tactics. Person A just takes them off and shoots them in the woods, not bothering to return the bodies to the families (we presume this to be about Belarus). Person B, who seems to be representing an Asian country, says that executioners ask forgiveness of the bodies of those killed, place flowers in their dead hands, and prepare a meal for the victim’s family. It’s hard to say which is more distressing.

And so it goes – we ricochet from Belarus (the only European country to retain the death penalty) to Belfast (appalling torture only happens in faraway lands? Think again!), via Argentina, America and China.

The term ‘total theatre’ could have been invented for this show: live music that veers from soft and sultry guitar boleros to big bombastic hand-beaten drum tattoos. Spoken words: disorientating dialogue, on-mic narration by the chipper compere, and a mock stand-up comedy scene in which we are treated to ‘impressions’ of death by various means, from gas chamber (‘Hisssssssssssssssss’) to stoning (‘I’ll just do an excerpt from this one because it can take hours!’). Recorded words: on-screen statistics, pre-recorded verbatim texts, and interview material – which includes an extraordinary detailed description of the process of electrocution given by renowned human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith. Word-free scenes using simple but beautiful choreography – the wooden stools become a recurring motif, and there is a lovely tango dance for the Argentinean story of a ‘disappeared’ young man. Startling visual images: two naked human bodies hunched up like oven-ready chickens, decorated in fruit then rolled in black plastic body bags; two condemned boys hung from the wall. Oh and then there’s the cooking… ‘Meat is murder’ rings through the hall, in our heads if not actually in reality.

There are many shows at the Edinburgh Fringe 2013 tackling harrowing personal stories and appalling political situations worldwide. Here’s one that knows how to do it in a way that leaves the audience shocked – but in the right sort of way. Shocked to learn (or be reminded of) such atrocities, but given this information in a way that uses the tools of theatre artfully to do so – telling us about terror without terrorising us; giving us food for thought. Having worthy and shocking stories to tell is not enough if you’re a theatre-maker – it’s how you tell them that matters. Just for the record: there were many walkouts; there were people in tears; there was a well-deserved ovation. Trash Cuisine is a phenomenal piece of theatre, an extraordinary achievement from Belarus Free Theatre.