Dante or Die are a company whose modus operandi often leads them to craft work by responding to specific sites and the potential stories locked within them. Past shows have included I Do, in which a series of hotel bedrooms served as a location to explore the build up to a wedding. Handle with Care, their latest work, continues this approach by unpicking one of those hidden sites/features of contemporary life, the self-storage facility. In the era of austerity this premise brings into sharp focus the value that we place (or not) on the objects we collect through life. The company work to do this using the neat narrative device of hiding a different scene behind each locker door, revealed one by one as we are escorted through the building.

At the heart of this narrative is an episodic flight through the life of one woman, Zoe (played by two actors: Amy Dolan as the younger Zoe and Rachael Spence as the mature Zoe) – from a fond farewell to a younger brother as he sets off travelling to 30 years later when, faced with her own teenage daughter, she once again has to ‘let go’. The audience are led from locker to locker, dashing down cold and uniformly concrete corridors. Characters we know, or are yet to meet, whizz by or are seen in the distance – associating the maze-like quality of the storage building with that similar quality to the instinctive choices we make in life. In counterpoint to the darting world of Zoe, Terry O’Donovan as The Worker (from the storage unit) is a sedate and detached (but never cold) figure.

Strewn in corners, or propped up against the lockers, are different objects. Divorced from their original context, they seem to lie in a kind of suspended animation, waiting for their owner’s return. This attention to the use of objects is a central detail of the work, and certain key objects appear, disappear and then re-appear (a wooly toy elephant, a painting, the absent brother’s shirt). Sometimes these objects are important, at others they are quickly passed over, further underlying the contextual nature of their importance.

This crafting and framing of the objects is repeated in the ways in which each locker is dressed. This works best when the company either embraces a realistic simplicity (a character, their thoughts and their teddy bear) or when the locker is transformed into another time and place. This occurs most notably when one large walk-in locker becomes both a 1990s rave and a strange embodiment of maternity. With baby clothes suspended from the roof four giant rabbits dance with Zoe, a kind of trippy, slow-motion dance, as she morphs from young to mature. These kind of moments are richest, in that they skilfully blend narrative with a nuanced and detailed sense of the emotional and visceral transitions we make as we grow older – here, from the heady escapism of youth to the complex delights of parenthood.

Throughout, Handle with Care is deftly supported by a richly layered soundscore, comprising popular music from 1988 to the present day, the tracks mixed and distorted so that they evoke the spirit of the individual time periods whilst conjuring a kind of bittersweet nostalgia. During the transitions in the corridors they also serve to collide the past and the present, subtly transforming the concrete corridors into liminal spaces. Often the music plays from unpacked sources, a cloth handbag or a shoe box. Often these are carried by the performers – a mark of how we attach memories and importance not only to objects but also to more ephemeral, non-material things (such as music).

Where the production struggles is ensuring the ostensibly psychological narrative world carries as much resonance as the more poetic images and choreographic sequences. The brevity of the scenes and their necessarily compact structure means that the arc of the scenes often feels rather rushed, with the need for the text to deliver exposition getting in the way of the emotional world of the characters – with some lines serving as rather clunky signposts of the themes behind the work. This challenge is handled more successfully by the more mature performers (Spence and Stephen Harry as her husband Simon), who successfully find subtle variations in their physicality to find a journey through the text. However, the younger performs struggle in this regard – they seem to lack the resources (or perhaps are drawing on less compatible techniques) to activate the text in this context. This is a shame as there is a lot of heart and soul in the work they do.

Handle with Care explores the way in which we desperately try to fix the ephemerality of experience in the objects we choose to keep: a loved one’s shirt, a few photographs, a teddy bear, that unwanted present we don’t have the heart to chuck away. This is richly embodied in the best moments of this show, as the performers manage to pin down the emotional intensity of charged and transient moments in the lives of the characters: a surprise discovery of a long-forgotten object, or the moment when you can finally let-go of the ‘thing’ that has served as a reservoir for complexly entwined and unresolved emotions.

With the enticing premise ‘What if Captain Scott actually perished whilst saving the world from aliens?’ this anarchic comedy provides an irreverently inventive take on the ‘real’ story behind Captain Scott’s 1912 expedition to the South Pole. Gonzo Moose are known for a farcical approach to storytelling, combining clowning, physical theatre and improvisation. These elements were cleverly synthesised under Abigail Anderson’s slick direction, framed by the concept that we the audience are attending the Open Your Brain 2016 conference. This title is displayed on a cloth screen courtesy of a wobbly-looking overhead projector, and we are apparently here to discover the truth about Captain Scott’s journey. Posing the important question ‘What do you know, how do you know it, and how do you know that you know that you know it?’, the three-strong ensemble undertake a mission to debunk the official story. Using their patented formula of ‘truth, fact = truthfact!’ they aim to show how something altogether more alien occurred. This provides an effective comic hook for the piece, which revels in its silliness, with a delightful sense of playfulness throughout.

The conference’s team of presenters, led by ‘George Cranston, BA’ are strongly characterised as bumbling and under-confident, tripping over wires and lines and introducing well-timed gags, such as some hilarious (and all too familiar to any conference attendee) stage business involving passing George a water bottle which he never opens. This successfully sets the tone for the piece, which makes the most of intertextual and contemporary  references (the ‘poems’ which Scott writes are all opening lines from popular songs, and some scenes are reminiscent of The Thing); physical comedy; and Brechtian techniques including ensemble playing, multi-rolling indicated by the exchange of basic costume pieces, and direct audience address. The talented cast (Mark Dawson, Alys Torrance, and Ben Whitehead) are extremely skilled at using these devices, deftly switching between characters and emotions. The visual aesthetic underscores these stylistic elements too: we are presented with an effective palette of Arctic hues, and although perhaps the use of OHP projections and home-made looking props is nothing new, the inventive ways in which they are used is really engaging.

We are introduced to the history of the 1912 mission, in a lecture littered with numerous ‘facts’, well-paced asides, and some effective audience interaction. We are shown Scott’s camp and team in The Antartica via the excellent multi-rolling, and the narrative is interrupted by well-placed ‘lecture’ sections which both re-cap the action and introduce what is to come, to an uproarious response from the audience each time. There follows a comic interlude involving a humorously bad penguin costume and accompanying song, although this section runs on a little too long. This was my only real criticism of the piece; a little more pace at points would have helped to keep the action moving on.

As the narrative progresses (largely through the perspectives of the expedition’s characters) we are introduced to concepts of magnetism, with the hint that this information might come in handy later on…

However, all is not well on this mission, a fact brought gloriously to the forefront by one character beginning to suffer with a ‘pustulating’ rash which seems alien in origin and is illustrated through the inventive use of bubble wrap. The sense of doom is further highlighted in an ill-planned cabaret evening, with an unforgettably dark accordion song performed with real aplomb by Ben Whitehead, warning that everyone is going to die. As the tension mounts, the piece’s design elements really come in to their own; a tent is constructed very inventively; there is a particularly effective alien attack sequence performed with verve and imaginative use of material; and hilarious utilisation of white plastic sheeting to show the characters’ progress in miniature through the snow.

Inevitably, Scott’s end finally comes, but pleasingly it is every bit as heroic and abstract in nature as the production leads us to expect.

Imagine you’re visited by an unearthly power that tells you that three hundred years from now, following the failure of the world’s economies and devastation caused by climate change, the only hope for the continuation of human life rests with one young woman. Aphra’s fate is sealed: in two weeks’ time she will slip, fall into a flooded river and die. That is, unless you act now. You can stop this from happening. You have agency in the universe’s destiny. This is the position that ten women find themselves in at the start of Melanie Wilson’s new sci-fi opera. What follows is their attempt to hear this call to arms for what it is and work out how to respond, in a race against time and the shrinking window of opportunity to save Aphra’s life.

To call it an opera is perhaps a little misleading. Co-composed by Wilson and Katarina Glowicka, the score is more episodic than a cogent whole, but with a persistent striving to elicit harmony, rhythm and choral richness from discordance. The piece does borrow opera’s often heightened quality, though, and Wilson’s culturally diverse ensemble, gifted with some extraordinary voices whose individuality is celebrated in some virtuosic arias, moves about the stage like planets orbiting an invisible sun. The piece shifts between this convocation’s highly stylised, impassioned, sometimes searching, sometimes declamatory dialogue and the more naturalistic narrative of Aphra, who, in a warm and engaging performance by Kate Huggett, sweet-voiced, gamine, vulnerable yet resilient, is perhaps more accessible to us than our contemporaries who are called upon to save her life.

Visually, it’s marvellous. Fly Davis has created a high curtained semi-circular chamber, which, flooded with Will Duke’s vivid projection design that fluidly segues between swirling galaxies, ravaged landscapes and text, is almost as immersive as a 3D cinema experience. High in the centre of this curtain is a circular pod, part Aphra’s weather station refuge, part sun, part crystal ball.

The piece relies on some familiar sci-fi tropes: ethereal polyphonic soundscapes tell us we’re in space; moony shimmering faces communicating in remote, distorted voices are the unearthly powers; and Aphra, kitted out in the obligatory combats, spends a lot of time peering at charts and recording a log. And the idea isn’t new either: that, in Wilson’s words, female stewardship can be the ‘arrowhead of change’. The call to arms is a call to work with what exists – ‘small acts of affinity and resistance’, to see ourselves differently, to be unafraid to speak out. The piece’s ambitious attempt, it seems to me, is to enable a different mode of conversation, to harness a different form of attention to what it goes without saying are vastly important ideas. And it seems to be trying to perform the alternative way of being that it proposes – to inhabit a space that’s simultaneously powerful and gentle, clear and complex.

However, whilst the message itself is unapologetically explicit, the piece nevertheless seems cautious about how to position itself. In the programme notes, Wilson writes that in the future world of the show ‘feminists are men as well as women’, but then goes on to say: ‘This opera focuses on women, though,’ in what seems an attempt to appease both those who would celebrate and those who would revile its overt feminism. I’m curious about this peculiar equivocation, and I’m also curious about my need for the piece to be somehow stronger, to be irresistible in its challenge. What’s going on when we can see very clearly what a piece is asking of us, when we agree with what it’s asking of us, and we still say, ‘Ask it better’? Opera for the Unknown Woman may be flawed, but those flaws seem to manifest something of the difficulty of speaking simply and directly when the stakes are so high and when we appear so determined to listen only on our own terms.