At the Brighton Festival 2018 official launch this morning, the much-anticipated ritual of opening the brand new programme for the first time was taking place everywhere. It’s printed using a typeface based on visual artist and Guest Director David Shrigley’s handwriting and it’s clear from the tone that, alongside a plethora of rich artistic experience on offer, his unique sense of humour will be felt at the festival, which runs May 5-27.

Hanif Kureishi and his interviewer Mark Lawson are both wearing black Nike trainers, and long professional acquaintance makes them as comfortable with each other as an old, expensive pair of shoes.

Tristan & Yseult has become something of a calling card for Kneehigh, which was founded in 1980 and is now the unofficial National Theatre of Cornwall. Emma Rice, currently artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe in London, created this production in 2003 with writers Anna Maria Murphy and Carl Grose, and it catapulted the company to national recognition.

It’s a tricky business, approaching comedy on a day when a national tragedy has just occurred. Comedian and broadcaster Adam Buxton is aware of this. It was especially noticeable last night, with his show delayed as a direct result of the Brighton Dome’s extra door security, post-Manchester. As people slowly filed in to take their seats he patrolled the stage, acknowledging the events of the day before. His attempts to move into comedy were initially somewhat awkward, as if it wasn’t quite appropriate. It’s understandable. There’s a general sense of unsureness as to how to proceed. Are we allowed to have a few laughs celebrating David Bowie’s life following such awful horror and ignorant malice?

The answer, of course, is “Yes, we are.” Otherwise the bad guys win. And Buxton eventually, pre-show, has roaring good humour bubbling up by making an event of giving the audience his rider: a bouquet of flowers and his “very rock’n’roll” boxes of two varieties of yoghurt bar. It’s a simple tactic but it works, and then he can begin the performance proper. “I don’t think much of David Bowie’s new phase,” he says. And we’re off.

Adam Buxton’s BUG: David Bowie Special, to give it its full and proper title, see its bearded presenter deliver what is, in essence, a comedic PowerPoint masterclass, hopping randomly about the Thin White Duke’s career. It begins with the video for “The Jean Genie” followed by a preposterous surreal song, sung by Buxton, which makes maximum use of the giant screen behind him for visual cut-ups.

The format throughout is for Buxton to mine geeky Bowie minutiae, finding humour in the detail, while also acknowledging the talent of all involved, then lathering on silliness. For instance, he talks at length about the rather lacklustre 1985 single “Loving the Alien”, which Bowie, he explains, once said was about the relationship between Muslims and Christians. He then sends the whole thing up, deadpan, before concluding that, sadly, “'Loving the Alien' failed to prevent 9/11.”

He asks us to imagine what RCA executives must have felt when presented with Bowie’s Berlin albums, after the commercial streak of Young Americans and Station to Station, which came immediately prior to them. To illustrate the point he plays the moody electro-orchestral “Warszawa”, then offers us the video for “Be My Wife” in which, he suggests, Bowie, wearing a face of pantomime disapproval, looks as if he’s seen someone crapping on the studio floor.

The BUG shows thrive on YouTube comments and this Bowie special is no exception. The comment, “He is the tasty egg of my breakfast glory”, beneath Bowie’s melancholy 2013 comeback hit “Where Are We Now?” causes particularly uproarious laughter. And the cartoon Bowie sequences, created by BAFTA-winning animators The Brothers McLeod, and perfectly voiced by Buxton, are brilliantly on-point, especially one where Brian Eno and Bowie work on “Warszawa”, with Tony Visconti continually pointing out that he is also the co-producer, "more than people think".

In the end, when this show, which has toured regularly over the last year, should reach an emotive climax with “Heroes” and Buxton’s own tribute montage, its late start becomes a hindrance. People are scuttling off to get trains and Buxton seems to wind things up rather promptly rather than luxuriating. Nonetheless, his Bowie Bug is a conceptually smart, often very funny and occasionally touching evening out.

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Overleaf: Watch the brilliant Brothers McLeod animation purporting to portray David Bowie, Brian Eno and Tony Visconti recording "Warszawa"

Brighton is getting a bit above itself tonight. There’s a weird full moon atmosphere in the Theatre Royal, even though it’s not a full moon. At one point, Rich Hall makes a gag wherein he wishes the world were run by women, the brunt of which is that if war were imminent they’d get together, bond over swatches of desert khaki, have a Prosecco and there’d be no war. “You’re a dickhead,” shouts a woman’s voice, loudly, “Misogynist!” Hall makes a show of being astounded. Then another male voice pipes up from the circle, “We don’t like Theresa May!” (for she was included in Hall’s short list of international female leaders). “I’m just mansplaining,” he adds. The latter phrase makes me feel ill. Everything’s gone a bit odd.

Brighton is a wonderful, fertile island of green-left Bohemia amid southern England’s depressing sea of blue, but its inhabitants do the place no favours when they haughtily, stridently declaim puritan political correctness in the middle of a comedy gig by a man who’s very clearly on the same side of the political fence. The whole of the first half of the show, indeed, sees the veteran US comedian tearing chunks out of Trump and all he stands for. Clad in a grey fedora, jeans, faded red T-shirt and open blue shirt, looking like a whiskery, affably dishevelled and smirking high-end hobo, Hall comments on the US President’s current visit to the Middle East. “He wouldn’t know if he was in Saudi Arabia or Celine Dion,” he deadpans before a whole routine about Trump’s inability to spell the word “tap”.

After the interval, the "Hoedown" aspect of the evening kicks in. Hall reappears with guitarist/bassist Rob Childs and drummer Mark Hewitt, “two of the best musicians within their price range”. Having stuck it to America in the first half, he now wants us to learn to love country music, he explains, but not of the “I’d like to have a beer with Jesus” variety. The idea is that he takes audience members' stories and turns them into song narratives. Much of the humour comes from the juxtaposition of everyday British mundanit with classic country’s association with widescreen vistas.

Thus we have odes to IT man Gary, “the guy who can fix the porn”, Rory the osteopath, and a fabulous road song tribute to a female audience member’s journey back to Hastings along the A259. Hall is especially proud of fitting Pevensey into his lyrics. It’s both sharply improvisational and smartly funny, despite a number of audience members either failing to play along with his gags or attempting – and failing – to match him in smartarse responses. Hall acknowledges the strange vibe of the crowd but Brighton’s rep is saved by “Tim” from the front row who is asked to sing backing vocals to a number towards the end, and given a mic.

His performance is outstanding, singing and freestyling with panache and playing along with Hall, who’s clearly impressed. “Tim” receives one of the night’s biggest rounds of applause. After him, Hall says he need to “regain control of the room” and does so with a fabulous Bob Dylan critique, including hysterical misplaying of his harmonica, before disappearing.

Brighton has clearly had a long day having a few too many G&Ts in the sun, creating an atmosphere of unpredictability and narcissistic heckling, but Hall, ever the pro, simply uses it to add an extra layer of edge and freneticism to a night of solidly entertaining freestyle comedy and music.

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Overleaf: Watch Rich Hall perform his Bob Dylan pastiche

The subtitle of Richard Nelson’s new trilogy suggests an anti-Trump polemic. Instead, its miraculous, almost invisible craft fulfils the President’s most hollow promise. It restores full humanity to a family of lower-middle class Americans who often feel slighted and helpless. As they gather around their kitchen table, the Gabriels talk and live more fully than most media and politicians ever really believe of those they describe and rule. Nelson has said his aim is “verisimilitude”, a seemingly modest ambition which wonderfully succeeds.

Old, young, or somewhere in the middle - people of all ages fill the seats around me and noisily wait for the evening to begin. The Picador Poetry List - home to literary giants like Carol Ann Duffy and Clive James - is celebrating its 20^th birthday in the grandeur of Brighton’s Theatre Royal with performances from five of its most exciting contemporary poets: Hollie McNish, Glyn Maxwell, Lorraine Mariner, Richard Osmond, and Kate Tempest. After head of Picador Poetry, Don Paterson, warms up the crowd with an introduction that borders on stand-up comedy, the lights dim and Hollie McNish (pictured below) takes to the stage.

Warm, personable, chatty, and humorous - McNish has the crowd in the palm of her hand from the moment she admits her poems are ‘mostly about getting fingered’. Reading from her debut Picador collection Plum, McNish’s stanzas of adolescent experimentation and outrageously frank confessions are peppered with moments of sheer genius: whilst “Wanking”’s “apparently up and down did not mean like a lever” has the audience in fits of giggles, the rawer “Because That’s What You Do” (which explores the tragic reason a friend of McNish’s got married) leaves the audience stunned and disarmed. McNish exits the stage to wild applause.

Twenty years after the Picador Poetry list began, its roster seems stronger than ever

Glyn Maxwell then walks on and, rather austerely, launches straight into his first poem. The audience seems slightly unsure what to make of him, until he subsequently starts up a steady stream of political quips and jokes, and both poet and crowd relax into their roles. Wry and winding, his poems are subtler than his predecessor’s but equally as enjoyable, especially his cathartic final piece exploring an acquaintance’s descent into extreme paranoia. Maxwell, too, leaves the stage to the fullest audience clapping.

Finishing the first half is Lorraine Mariner, a deceptively upbeat and chirpy woman whose poems explore “everyman” fantasies, and the slivers of humanity seen in day-to-day life; she gets the biggest laugh of the evening in her understated opening poem about breaking up with her invisible boyfriend, Stanley. Turning to social media halfway through her set, her poem “Fortune” is a witty cross-examination of her Facebook friends list, culminating in a profound condemnation of Facebook as a “strutting peacock, pecking at my heels”.

After the interval, Richard Osmond reads from his first collection of poetry, Useful Verses, the standout poem from which is “Luck and Colour”, in which the narrator meets a leprechaun and describes him from the point of view of a botanist, a coder, and a teenager. Interspersed between his “normal” poems are the eponymous “useful verses” – cures for lunacy, spots, and snake bites translated from olde English. Wickedly self-aware, his pastiches of superstition and non-verbal utterances leave the audience amused and impressed.

Finally, it’s Brighton Festival curator Kate Tempest’s turn to talk. Rejecting the microphone in the centre of the stage, Tempest wanders around the stage, melting poems from her three published works Hold Your Own, Brand New Ancients, and Let Them Eat Chaos into one epic narrative. Lilting between fury and ecstasy, there’s something ageless and infinitely wise about Tempest - through her characters, she shows us “tenderness, jealousy, curses and gifts”. Despite having started her set with the observation that “bored shitless and deeply moved sound exactly the same” from an audience, the subdued audience are most definitely in the latter category - by the time she finishes and marches off, the enraptured audience are shouting for more.

20 years after the Picador Poetry list began, its roster seems stronger than ever with these five at the helm. Unique, witty, and engaging; the evening sums up everything poetry should be...

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Overleaf: Watch the video for the poem "Embarrassed" by Hollie McNish

Dream palace, cesspit and church; celebrated, mopped (by Marlene Dietrich, no less) and fucked: Brighton’s Theatre Royal has seen a whole lot of history, of both the splendid and the seedy variety. Now it has found a magnificent if unlikely mouthpiece in the form of post-modern cabaret star Meow Meow.

Watching tango dancers Gisela Galeassi and Nikito Cornejo own the apron of the stage during the second half of m¡longa, the brain finds it difficult to process what the eyes are seeing. The pair seem to be one writhing, dark-toned dervish of jutting, sensual, passionate movement. Back and forth they go, he spinning her round his body like a silk scarf, fluid as mercury; her feet attacking the stage, staccato, kicking out, kicking down, so fast it really is the proverbial blur. Nigh on two hours of tango with a 20-minute interval might sound like too much, but with only the smallest of lulls in interest, this show grips, from start to finish.

Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s international breakthrough was his award-winning 2008 collaboration, Sutra, with the artist Anthony Gormley and the Shaolin monks. He has since become a leading choreographer, always willing to explore global influences and sources. He’s revelled in the Hispanic before on the flamenco-themed Dunas, with Spanish dancer María Pagés but m¡longa is as very different affair, unwrapping the Argentinian tango and opening it out to a kind of visual concept album, based around six couples, coming together and apart, in different moods, in what we may imagine to be a Buenos Aires cityscape of streets, cafés and nightclubs.

The bandoneon-led sound of tango is an easy delight

As well as dancers, m¡longa utilises film and visuals to potent effect. There is a wonderful scene where a dancer stands with his back to us manipulating a giant screen of photos via gesture, like Tom Cruise in the film Minority Report. And another where dancers rush about trying to keep up with landscapes speeding past behind them, like Hollywood actors at the dawn of cinema comedy. On one occasion these visuals precede the show’s most enjoyable moment of outright clowning, when brightly auburn-haired dancer Vivana D’Attoma plays a woozy drunk, trying to pull the suavely dismissive, evening wear-clad Gabriel Bordon. Her floppy moves, precisely estimated, are a well-portrayed twist on the rest.

Some set pieces are isolated moments, such as the somehow shocking dance wherein Esther Garabali and Martin Epherra act out, via tango of course, an explosive relationship, bordering on the violent, or a sequence where three male dancers perform a particularly frantic, energetic routine. Other themes, however, run throughout, interspersed with the rest of the action. Particularly notable is the relationship between the couple played by Silvina Cortés and Damien Fournier who, often surrounded by the ensemble as an intrusive hubbub of night world activity, find each other, have a one-night stand, go their separate ways, and, perhaps, find one another again.

There's a minimum of props – a flag, a few chairs – and music plays a key role. The bandoneon-led sound of tango is an easy delight anyway, and composer Szymon Brzóska’s interpretation of it via a five-piece musical group, stage right, is well-estimated, bursting with life where required but also dropping to loose downtempo arrangements suitable for the more interpretive modern dances. M¡longa is an eyeful, and holds the attention with vim, vitality and sheer hard-practiced skill.

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Overleaf: Watch trailer for Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui m¡longa

A whacking great story has gone largely untold in British theatre: the legacy of colonialism in India, including the cultural ghosts the British left behind. With the 70^th anniversary of Indian independence just round the corner this summer, poet and playwright Siddhartha Bose has set out to address this "historical amnesia".