Japanese director Ninagawa’s assertion that he is not interested in what’s new but what works might be a suitable reference point for this delicately witty and, by turns, tender offering by south coast outfit Oh! Productions. The premise is simple: newlyweds Sophie (Sophie Powell) and Olly (Oliver Harrison) have been gifted a flatpack house and we watch as they try to put it together (following the numbered order). Boxes open out to become windows, doors, and furniture – all the while Sophie and Olly gradually losing their control of the situation.

Flat Pack is clearly riffing with the silent films of the 1920s and 1930s – at times it is Buster Keaton, at others Laurel and Hardy – and each scene, or rather each skit, is constructed as a comic puzzle, neatly sequenced and directed by Steven Harper.

Alex Stanford’s live music is an integral part of this puzzle, with Stanford shifting between responding to the action and driving it forward. Entwined within Stanford’s music are small glimpses of classic children’s melodies (Puff the Magic Dragon and Let’s Go Fly a Kite amongst many others). This layering expands the world of the play, bringing in brief but rich associations to the action they accompany.

Puppet versions of Sophie and Olly also enrich the scope of the world, allowing the narrative to increase in scale (as Olly attempts to put the chimney on the roof) and to find fantastical moments (notably when a Mary Poppins-esque wind carries Sophie away over the heads of the audience). Some deft shadow puppetry is vital to bringing the drama to a head, as the poor newlyweds stare down an oncoming locomotive.

Powell is immensely charming and nuanced as Sophie, without becoming winsome or superficial. She articulates the joyful exuberance and flirtatious energy of the start of married life, whilst also giving us glimpses of the frustrations and tensions of adjusting to this new situation. As her new husband Oliver Harrison is a more naive presence (more Chaplin than Keaton, more Laurel than Hardy), but he is still warm and open – and particularly good in marshalling the youngest audience members in the moments of audience participation. When the action stills and the two have to just be together on stage they conjure a rich sense of their mutual attraction and ease in each other’s presence.

The most joyous aspects of Flat Pack are those moments when the light-hearted comic sketches smuggle into themselves moments of poetry. Casually, almost nonchalantly a wedding veil becomes the newlyweds’ curtains – the ritual costume of marriage ceremony transforming into a symbolic border between the outer world and the inner world of the marriage.  Or, more boldly, a chimney pot falls from the roof to be made into hat stand – the adaptive, make-do-and-mend spirit of a good marriage.

Like all the best silent films Flat Pack manages to be both funny and moving, prosaic, earthy and poetic.

D-Code starts slowly:  a crumpled paper sheet, the size of a person – maybe a map, maybe a patchwork of newspaper clippings, something we can’t make out – twists and lifts in a breeze we can’t perceive.  As the sheet, which seems to have vital information on it somehow, becomes more animated, a form becomes visible beneath it. This is more than flotsam, this is someone, being carelessly cast around by the elements.

‘Did you know that humans were nomads for three million years?’ asks a disembodied voice. At the end of this drifting sequence, up from the ground, in a chrysalis of tissue paper, rises the form of Yael Karavan. Finally revealed, ‘the human behind the sheet of paper’, she takes us, through impeccable physical manipulation, through the entire evolution of homo sapiens, from the first legless creatures crawling through the primordial ooze to an upright dancer skimming the ground. It’s a simple concept but so eloquent in context – the fabrication of countries and the idea that people are possessed by a specific patch of ground is so ludicrous against the scale of how we came to be here at all.

The tension in this piece is always between the personal and the political. Although it has been in progress for a couple of years now, D-Code could not be more topical, with the mass deportation of displaced peoples happening even as I type. Karavan’s wise choice not to root the core story in one specific state, or conflict, not to hone in on one specific and literal message, or speak directly to the audience at any length (relying instead on recorded voices), is to the benefit of this show, keeping a universal relevance.  It would make an eloquent double bill with Joe Sellman-Leava’s verbose Labels.

Karavan’s distinctive language of movement is always compelling to watch, and here she is complemented to great effect by the striking production design.  Projection is used astutely to create some truly remarkable visuals. Torn scraps of paper become treasured photographs burning up in the ruins of a bombed out house, Karavan’s white translucent mac becomes a canvas painted with light and data.

We see a spiralling DNA sequence fill her outline with GATCs, then a diagram of blood vessels, then a map; all the while a recorded voice gives a litany of genetic heritage, ‘12% Italian, 3% English 0.2% Belarusian…’ So many nations it becomes meaningless. All the while Karavan’s illuminated outline glows on the wall behind her. It’s an unforgettable visual that transcends the message of D-Code to be art in its own right.

The set is spare: a bare floor and three big paper flats in a rough semi-circle bordering the upstage space. Karavan opens a suitcase centre stage and a perfect model house sits within, on a carefully manicured lawn. An hour with just a handful of props and herself; no flashy gimmicks needed.

In one of many richly visual moments in D-Code Karavan stands centre stage, mostly silhouetted by warm white sidelight, and slowly turns while red sand pours from her outstretched fists. It was inexplicably pleasing to see a perfect circle ascribed around her bare feet in scarlet grains of sand, marking out one human’s allocation of space on the Earth.

As the narration speaks of nation the three banner-like background flats are lit in red, white, and blue – the iconography of a flag is that of a person divided by cartography and governments. In scenes of conflict they glow a deep bloody red. In two sequences Karavan simply and powerfully lights herself with a handheld torch, focusing on her feet as she is chased from nation after nation, or on each limb and extremity as they are assigned a country of origin.

The simplicity and clarity of production design, and the subtle complexity of Carl Beukman’s compositions, the soundscape that underscores it all, tie Karavan’s performance into an elaborate sensory immersion. At one point a layered series of voiceovers, in all of the languages Karavan holds under her tongue, escalates into a veritable Babel while, with controlled wildness, she flings herself through a rhythmic sequence of movements – each tied to a place she could be said to be from – hopping barefoot over battle lines she herself has drawn in gravel on the ground.

Particularly deserving of mention is the haunting mask work with a sheet of torn tissue paper. The eerie disembodiment effected by the blank sheet in place of a face succinctly and definitively answers the core question: of course a human is more important than the written papers that represent them.

There are many aspects and individual moments that could be singled out, but it is in the sum of its parts that D-Code holds its power. The rich tapestry of visuals with a strong, but mostly unspoken undercurrent of political and personal crises (and resolution) of identity and global displacement is a pleasure to watch, yet also provokes sentiments that are beyond words. I left the performance with a sense of belonging, of sisterhood with humans from anywhere who can move and create and appreciate beauty.

Set in near-darkness, Cathedral, inspired by a short story by Raymond Carver, uses light and sound to explore our experience of memory, truth, and reality. The darkness is disorienting at first, leaving us in a heightened state of awareness, waiting in earnest for the smallest flicker of light or movement.

The performance is built around these flickers – snippets of story told through voices broadcast from an old cassette player, describing a seemingly random selection of memories from a relationship. The memories are disjointed and without context, but even so, we strive to construct a narrative to connect them, actively looking for the beginning, middle, and end of the relationship in their disparate recollections. The couple are never seen but their voices and their memories paint a vivid picture, full of the small details that make each relationship unique: how they met, the way she looked in the bath, the scrawl of her handwriting.

Gradually, in low light – and often no light – two performers begin to act out not the scenes being described, but rather their memory, or perhaps just the feeling of the memory.  Sometimes their movements are slow and measured, at other times quick and erratic. With handheld lights, they cast ethereal shadows across the stage adding to the surreal quality of the disembodied voices. The clever use of light focused solely on a performer’s mouth, for instance, seems synchronized with the recorded voice but as sound and performer slowly become uncoordinated the scene eerily mirrors the disintegration of memory as we might experience it.

Given the darkness of the performance, Cathedral also relies heavily on sound for impact, and the sound design of each memory adds another layer of meaning. Some clips sound distorted or distant as though painful or only barely remembered, where others are repeated throughout and frequently overlapped, suggesting pain or regret. These effects seem to more closely mirror the reality of patterns of memory: the random access, the vagueness, the blanks.

Although two voices (male and female) are present throughout, the two performers are both women, begging the question of whose memory it is. Could it be the memory of the male voice, his memory of the woman? Are the performers two different characters, or are they different memories of the same character? Do they represent characters at all? Many of the moments described are dreamlike, Carver’s imagery references priests and doppelgangers, giving the narrative a morbid feel and encouraging the audience to question the truth of each memory. Accordingly it is a highly conceptual performance, nothing is concrete, everything open to interpretation.  While this can be liberating, it is also frustrating at times, offering little in the way of resolution.

As a whole, the experience of the performance recreates well the feeling of memory, which its research, partially supported by the Wellcome Trust, sets out to explore. Simple actions such as a performer repeatedly moving their light across their body give the impression of remembering the same, single detail again and again. Or a split second of light first distorting and then clarifying a silhouette conveys a memory just out of reach before becoming clear. While each of the memories that make up Cathedral provides a moment of interest or intrigue, the performance overall feels less cohesive, ending abruptly and leaving the audience without a firm grasp on the overall intent. The experience is certainly immersive and explores some interesting subject matter but leaves the audience with rather more questions than answers.