After a number of successful touring shows, including a contemporary opera for young people (last year’s Swanhunter), the Wrong Crowd have made a new piece, again for young people, which has no words at all. They say in the programme notes that ‘this suits us well as visual theatre makers,’ and you can feel the freedom in the making of the show: everything is malleable, everything here is at the service of the storytelling, a sweet and simple tale of accepting life’s changes, of how conflicting approaches to grief can be reconciled.

We begin with the Girl (played by Charlotte Croft), after the death of her mother, leaving her home by the sea and moving to London to live with her Grandmother (Liz Crowther), packing only a few mementos of her mother and an old paper kite. This chunk of exposition and story is told with wonderful swiftness and spareness. All the elements available are utilised: scenography, sound, object work, physicality and looks between the characters. This includes, right from the start, the work of the other two performers, Linden Walcott-Burton and Nicola Blackwell, who are credited as ‘The Wind’, and are, beyond that (and a certain amount of nimble scene-changing) the anima, the breath of the piece, fluttering clothing, setting things moving. They whisk away things that need to be lost and deliver them precisely when and where they need to be found. It’s a delicious conceit that is very puppetry-centred but also sits perfectly at the heart of the more movement-based languages of the show.

Sometimes the movement/visual sequences are right on point: as the two arrive at their now shared home, there’s a moment where Grandmother acknowledges adjusting the table in her kitchen to seat two – an instant that somehow says everything about the changes in her space, her life. At other times they’re a little overworked, and heavy-handed: there’s a conflict over sitting down to dinner that had me wondering if the Girl was meant to be fifteen or five, and in either case didn’t really ring true – it felt more like an elegant exercise than essential storytelling.

Design (by Rachael Canning, who also directs) is a brilliantly effective mix of real-world objects (a fridge, a wheelie bin, a bed, a window frame) backed by colour-changing neon strips that allow it all to be more abstract in an instant, becoming trains and rooftops and city exteriors. Similarly, ornaments and books can become landscapes and scenery. Sound and music by Isobel Waller-Bridge is at its best when neatly accentuating action, supporting storytelling, and rather less so when slightly-too-frequently seeming to insistently tell us what to feel in scenes (mostly a rather non-specific maudlin bittersweetness).

The show culminates in a climactic magic-realist sequence as the girl is whisked across night-time London by her kite, with Grandmother soon in hot pursuit. The Wind, and the kite, help the Girl soar through her new environment, shedding the relics of her mother as she goes. These all fall neatly into the path of Grandmother who finally lets them in, admitting her own memories. It’s possibly over-tidy as a narrative device but it’s undeniably touching in performance.

And here too, the show is best when the urgent necessities of narrative propulsion lead the visual work, and less so when the other way around: the figurative puppetry (as so often when it appears in theatre) is absolutely paradigmatic of this. So, we have miniature tabletop figures of Girl and Grandmother, soaring and shivering amongst and above pop-up-book London. It’s a great vision, and it’s all elegantly done. But the flying Girl puppet has no weight, and so no struggle, none of the conflicting emotions that her human counterpart displays, and is not properly at the mercy of her kite. The Grandmother puppet is shaken (a right puppet no-no) rather than trembling, when cold. It means they don’t have full puppet agency: they become illustrative, like the picture-book itself, moments of visual pleasure rather than emotional heft. And this is how I feel, in the end, about the show itself: it is well-made, well-structured, well-intentioned; subtle and slick, beautifully performed; but crucially lacking some of that final connection to truthful human depth that would make it genuinely moving.

Inspired by the true stories of women in the 1960s forced to give up their children under pressures from the church, family, or community, Vamos Theatre present a visual narrative of one woman’s journey to discover her birth mother, beginning at her funeral.

An organ laments, an elderly gentleman enters. The stiff back and rigid knees (of Richard J.Fletcher) play the aged body of the accompanying mask with magnificent skill and detail, that continues to be demonstrated by all the performers who multi-role in full mask throughout. Physicality is heightened and powerfully combined with the mask’s exaggerated features to define characteristics that draw personality quickly and acutely. This is a wordless world where movement is what will move us through a very personal narrative.

The tempo of a teenage girl getting ready in her swinging-60s bedroom is juxtaposed with her single father’s drawn-out penny-counting in his dowdy kitchen. A surly waitress waddles heavily across her cafe while her customers fidget, hairdressers cock their heads with clicks of scissors as their clients lazily flick through magazine pages. Director Rachael Savage brings an astute sense of the effectiveness of tensions illustrated through opposing rhythms – the choreography of these scenes plays beautifully. Highlights come in extended sequences of synchronised movement, one of which shows our young mother as she fails to keep up with her colleague’s accelerating typewriter dings; another where she frantically tries to sit still in a hospital birthing room whilst two older mothers plod easily through their labour.

There are many moments of tender humour and a good dose of heartfelt drama, endorsed by Janie Armour’s well-written score that melds musical genres from opera to Lulu. However, much of the meaty drama takes place in the second half and the opening would have benefited from some more dynamic changes of pace to really grab an audience and take us on board. The form of the full mask is used with great skill and successfully abstracts a personal story to make it accessible. I enjoy the physical characterisation but the moments where we push towards a form of masked dance theatre could be taken still further. Big emotions require bold forms and spaces and the set here, for all its fantastically lurid 60s stylings, seemed too clean and closed for the tragedy of the story. This is a touching piece of theatre, and it’s great to see the mask form being used so effectively to share this piece of social history, but it just falls short of fully punching me in the gut with the weight of its emotion.

This atmospheric response to Monteverdi’s opera Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria is the latest UK premiere from prolific Australian circus company Circa. A regular visitor to London’s Barbican, it is Circa’s first visit as part of the London International Mime Festival.

The Return sees six acrobats (three men and three women) share the roles of ‘a man trying to get home, and a woman waiting for a man who hasn’t arrived.’  By turns reflective and explosive, it surfs the different emotional territories that these two agonisingly pertinent scenarios conjure up.

A long steel wall bars the figures from the upstage area, in a striking echo of the walls erected by Greece, Bulgaria, and Hungary over the last three years as a means to prevent the migration of refugees from the world’s war zones. But Circa aren’t concerned with attempts to scale the wall, or to glimpse the other side; rather the six figures gaze out into the auditorium. More accurately their gaze is fixed beyond the auditorium – a thousand-yard stare confronting the world outside, as if somewhere out there lies the person or place they seek. This is an evocative proposition, and one that provides some fertile territory for the acrobatics, contortion, and acro-balance that dominates the work. This reliance on the capacity of the acrobats, without apparatus, speaks both to the displaced’s loss of material possessions and their loss of stability and security.

There is one scene though where the acrobats turn to apparatus. In turn, each of the three women take their place on one piece of apparatus. First a suspended cube, then a pair of straps, and finally a set of multiple hand-balancing canes. The first two sequences build in intensity, clearly becoming a means to articulate the internal world of the women, but it is the final sequence, with Nicole Faubert twisting and turning slowly atop the canes of various heights, that crowns this sequence. As Faubert teeters and stretches into space, the two other women curl up, immobile at the base of the canes, staring up as if shell-shocked. Here it is the crushing emptiness of waiting for the unknown that stands out.

The Return blends its dynamic acrobatics with a series of extracts from Monteverdi’s opera, played and sung live from a small platform to the side of the stage. Interspersed amongst these extracts are electronic compositions by four contemporary composers in response to Monteverdi’s work. Thus the musical world of the piece shifts between richly nuanced melodies and striking sonic landscapes.

The Return is early into its life in Circa’s repertoire and the acrobats are yet to settle into the ebb and flow of the emotional worlds of each scenario. What is clear about the work is the way in which the emotional resonance of each ‘act’ is clearest in the moments when the acrobatics turns away from explosive movements and towards an attempt to ‘still’, or resist the flow of movement. Most strikingly this occurs when two acrobats, one-by-one, slowly and unsteadily stand one on top of the other, then to be joined by a third, on top of the second, to form a tower of three acrobats. By denying themselves the momentum that might usually be used to arrive in position in this trick the acrobats make it harder to achieve. The result is that the tremors and movement of the actors forced by their attempts to retain their balance becomes more pronounced – the strain visibly heightened by the slowness of the movement. In this moment the tangible strain of the trick achieves a degree of poetry that unlocks the struggle of the dispossessed.

As with many physically taxing performances there is a tangible tension in seeing, up close, the bodies of the performers under stress, a tension that much of the clarity of the world hangs upon. But I wonder if this is also a show that might benefit by watching it from a greater distance, providing a chance to take in the full width of the shallow stage, and with this the scale of the situation that faces these acrobats, and more importantly the people on the shores and seas of the Mediterranean, and in the camps and temporary accommodation dotted throughout Europe and the Middle East.