As befits a festival with a spoken word artist as its guest curator, storytelling is at the heart of the visual arts offer in the 2017 Brighton Festival. It is not known if performance poet Kate Tempest had a hand in commissioning these four shows, but she can probably relate to the four artists in town right now. Among their tales are stories from Turkey, the Australian Outback and, closer to home, the Sussex village of Ditchling.

There is a sequence in theatrical circus troupe Casus’ new production, Driftwood, where three of the five members sit, each between the legs of another, in a row, facing the front of the stage. They look as if they’re about to do the rowing dance people in the Eighties used to do to the Gap Band’s “Oops Upside Your Head” at suburban discos. That is not what they do. Instead the front one rolls back onto the one behind, who in turn rolls back onto the one behind and, before you know it, the three off them have formed a human totem pole. It’s one of those things where your eyes can’t quite believe it’s happened. But then there’s a lot of that with Casus. They major in physical impossibility.

Casus, appearing in the Theatre Royal at Brighton Festival, are a five-piece Australian outfit – at least for the purposes of this show – consisting of two women and three men. Driftwood is performed, all smiles, all the time, and there’s a loose conceptual theme, which is helping one and other, being a collective unit. Happily, the whole is spiced with easy good humour. A regular problem with high-end circus is that it can be presented po-faced, beautifully lit, but utterly serious, like an art installation. No such issues here, and a full house, including many small children, clapping regularly at their feats, is a testament to the fact this lot can entertain on multiple levels.

Driftwood begins under a regular domestic, drum-style lamp shade, lowered from the heavens, which the ensemble throng under, moving in a circle, gripping one another, like human waves. Throughout 70 minutes of intense, acrobatic physicality, multiple types of skill are shown. An early highlight comes when one member is held between two and used as a skipping rope for another, while there's also a lovely sequence of hoop play, 15 feet off the ground, intricate and thrillingly dangerous-looking, to the gentle soundtrack of Gotye’s ballad “Heart’s a Mess”.

Comedy is provided by, among much else, Casus co-founders Jesse Scott and Lachlan McAulay playing off their difference in height, or a sequence in which a clothes horse is dressed with much clowning. By the same token, there are moments of pure visual artistry, where the audience makes noises of quiet wonderment, such as a simple but eye-boggling piece where one of the men places his back in the lamp-light and contorts his musculature into all manner of shadowed physical shapes.

Watching this performance, the mind almost suffers astonishment fatigue for, by the end, I'm taking for granted things that are unachievable for 99.9 percent of us. There are moments so startling they remain on the mind’s eye for some time afterwards. One such is a sequence involving three members hooping, with four hoops each, until they are spread equidistantly on their bodies. It’s a hypnotic sight that the retina absorbs yet takes a moment fully to comprehend. There is much else in a similarly brain-boggling vein, rope work and extraordinary balancing skills, but let’s leave those, for circuses need spoilers as little as any other art from. Suffice to say Driftwood is a show it would be difficult to walk out of feeling anything other than awed.

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Overleaf: Watch the trailer for Casus Circus's Driftwood

The main room of the Duke of York’s is humming. Brighton’s cinema-goers and music-lovers have turned out in their droves to catch Wrangler (an electronic outfit made up of Cabaret Voltaire’s Stephen Mallinder, Tuung’s Phil Winter, and producer Benge) and art-pop-singer-cum-soundtrack-composer Mica Levi “subvert boring live soundtracks” in their attempts to recreate two "lost films": The Tourist and The Colour of Chips.

The two main commands coming from the stage at this evening's Brighton Festival event are “Everybody jump, jump” and “Put your hands in the air and go side-to-side”. The crowd are mostly under 30 and emanate dancing energy from the moment the doors open, as DJ Molotov warms up. The set-up is basic, a DJ and some mics, but that’s as it should be for, on one level, this evening takes hip hop back to its Bronx block party origins, away from all the bling nonsense that’s taken it over. On another level, it’s a very British affair.

High Focus, a Brighton record label founded in 2010, are probably best known for backing the early career of 2017 breakout artist Rag’n’Bone man, and releasing his “Bluestown EP” debut. However, among many connoisseurs of UK hip hop, they’ve established themselves as a force to be reckoned with, moving the genre away from the Autotune cheese of lame US stars such as Drake and Fetty Wap, and focusing on the genre’s core values of lyricism and back-to-basics beats.

Jam Baxter is on first, a rapper who’s been with High Focus since they began. Clad in hip hop's regulation baggy jeans and top – which comes off to reveal a white T-shirt - he's jokey between songs, advising any “youngers” in the audience “not to take pharmaceuticals and go to Mansion 38”. He then lets loose with cuts from his own recent album of that name. His enthusiasm is contagious. He’s followed by The Four Owls, a collaboration between MCs Fliptrix, Verb T, BVA and Leaf Dog, each rated in their own right before hooking up to put together their 2011 debut album, Nature’s Greatest Mystery, which was an early breakthrough for the label. Initially wearing masks (pictured above), their verbal interaction is honed and slick, as they bounce around bursting with vitality. They hype up the crowd but the tunes, including songs from last year’s Natural Order album, are partly lost amid murky sound.

Tonight’s big problem is the sound system, which is, sadly, not really up to the task at hand. It appears that it's being over-driven, the bass is distorted and the words which, of course, are everything in real hip hop become an imprecise stew. The effect is to render the skilled flows of these MCs a dense attack of indiscernible barking. Because you can’t hear what they’re saying, after a while their MCing just becomes a jarring metronomic hammering. The crowd don’t seem to mind. Many of them already know the words anyway, and all have come to party.

Headliner Ocean Wisdom suffers least from these problems. Either the system has been tweaked, or he’s able to enunciate beyond whatever the issue is. He’s one of the fastest MCs in the world, officially head-to-head with Eminem. Clad in a black top, with combat trousers, a beanie hat and a neck-chain, and accompanied by his own hype man, he rips into his debut album of early last year, Chaos ’93, its diary-like tales, sometimes based in Brighton where he lives, machine-gunning from his mouth, a staccato attack that’s nothing short of thrilling.

Unfortunately, following Ocean Wisdom's every move closely is a guy with a camera on a steadicam. He's an extremely annoying visual distraction. He’s clearly getting rubbish footage, usually from behind the action, but he shadows the performers ceaselessly, bouncing around, and enjoying the excitement of being onstage. Whoever let him on made a drastic error of judgement. His presence takes away from the show's impact and just looks crap. I was not alone in observing this.

Nonetheless, Ocean Wisdom is a next-level talent who will likely be bursting out of the UK hip hop micro-verse to higher profile success soon. Despite the iffy sound and the over-enthusiastic camera dude, he topped off a likeable night boosted by a crowd buzzing with youthful zest and energy.

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Overleaf: Watch the video for "Walkin'" by Ocean Wisdom

The capacity crowd at the Brighton Dome occasionally bursts into noisy life, whooping, whistling, roaring with indignation as poet and Brighton Festival 2017 Guest Director Kate Tempest performs her album of last autumn, Let Them Eat Chaos. During the raging, coruscating, vitally pertinent “Europe is Lost” a loud sense of audience outrage explodes as she spits the incendiary lines, “Caught sniffing lines off a prostitute’s prosthetic tits/Now he’s back to the House of Lords with slapped wrists/They abduct kids and fuck the heads of dead pigs/But him in a hoodie with a couple of spliffs/Jail him, he’s a criminal”. Tempest is ever an unlikely crowd-rouser, diminutive, shy, wearing a simple black smock top and trousers, yet she’s altogether gripping.

Behind and around her are musicians from Orchestrate, a network of young, British, classically trained musicians. They’ve worked, in the past, with artists such as The National and Christine and the Queens. Tonight they play an interpretation, arranged by their own Bridget Samuels, of the backing music for Tempest’s album. It’s the first time the two have performed together and it takes a moment to bed in at the start. At first Tempest seems to be on a different plane, going her own way with them noodling in the back, but it doesn’t take long for things to gel. By the time the poem “We Die” climaxes, their threatening tide of riffing stings, low and high, has become very much part of the potency.

It's an evening of two halves. Before the interval Orchestrate, conducted by Jóhann Jóhannsson associate Anthony Weeden, play a short set of music by Mica Levi, mostly from the films Jackie and Under The Skin, although starting with “State of New York” by Levi’s band Micachu and the Shapes, based on the orchestral remix from their Chopped and Screwed album. Their set acts as an aperitif, building a mood, and closing with the wonderfully sinister pulse of sounds from Under The Skin, which was performed alongside the film at this venue last Sunday.

Tempest, however, is the main dish, without doubt. Let Them Eat Chaos is a concept piece, set on a London street at 4.18 AM, and using the stories of seven individuals awake at that hour as a prism to view those shat on by the value-free materialist drive of contemporary Britain. They range from a drug-addled roadie to a bereaved mother to a successful young PR man in existential crisis, but all share a loneliness enhanced by the dead-eyed societal drive around them. Tempest attacks every line, mining it for its rawest meaning, blasting through it without notes, contorting her body when the narrative is riven with upset. She's relentless, until she falls, drained, after 45 non-stop minutes, upon the climatic pleaded request, “Wake up and love more”. Whereupon she receives a standing ovation, returning to the stage for three sets of bows. She looks distinctly uncomfortable with this. It doesn't seem to be what she’s in it for.

After years of reading only positive feedback about Kate Tempest, recently I’ve noticed a slight hesitancy, a turn on social media. The line seems to be that a smidgeon of guileless, socio-political verbal harrying is fine, but doesn’t she go on. Well, that’s bollocks, isn’t it. In a Britain where apathy is rife, the media backs the money, and debate has descended into splashing about images of Theresa May Photoshopped as a vampire, I welcome art that scalpels the deep-set issues ruining this nation. And Kate Tempest’s passion is a blade with bite.

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Overleaf: watch Kate Tempest perform Let Them Eat Chaos on the BBC

There are two types of family-friendly entertainment; the kind you’d happily watch a bit of whether you have small children in tow or not (The Simpsons, The Clangers, Laurel & Hardy, etc), and those where you grit your teeth, hold your nose, and wither a little inside for the sake of attendant little ones (Tinkerbell and the Pirate Fairy, The Tweenies, Postman flippin’ Pat, etc). Attending this show, I had no idea which side of the fence it would fall. It says “Age 3+” in the programme but, by the same token, has received plaudits from serious broadsheet media. Turns out it’s a gem.

Jeramee, Hartleby and Oooglemore was created by the Unicorn Theatre, a venerable London institution which has focused on creating theatre that appeals to children since the mid-1940s. Directed by Tim Crouch and written by Gary Owen, it stars Jude Owusu, Lotte Tickner and Fionn Gill, respectively, as the titular characters. With much brio, they inhabit the roles of three children (we must assume) on a beach. The only dialogue throughout, including an amusing transistor radio broadcast Jeramee listens to as he relaxes in his deckchair, is their names, yet the trio build an ebullient character comedy that’s more engaging than seems feasible, given the simple ingredients.

It’s simply a delicious 50 minutes of innocent, uncomplicated slapstick giggles

Hartleby, the sole female character, arrives onstage first. Although she enjoys, via much mimed silliness, setting out her towel and relaxing for some of the time, she’s primarily the hyperactive one with a particular enthusiasm for ball games. Oooglemore we might regard as the youngest, an often bemused toddler type whose enthusiasm suddenly wanes amidst whatever activity he’s taking part in, so that he stands vacant or flops on the floor like a stressed Iggle-Piggle from CBeebies’ The Night Garden. Jeramee is the one with authority, perhaps the oldest, perhaps even a parent, although his hopelessness at putting up his own deck chair sends him into a minor tantrum.

It's a show of much clowning that also captures the ways of small children in a manner that’s genuinely heart-warming. The scene when a shivering Oooglemore pretends to be colder than he is so that Jeramee cajoles Hartleby into lending him her beloved towel, then revels spitefully in his success, will ring true with any parents of under-sevens. The youngsters in the audience clearly recognised the truth of the characters and were cackling away, en masse. One of their number, a boy of around seven/eight called Noah, became very much part of the action when his attempts to return a beach ball to Oooglemore descended into physical farce.

Music also adds to the fun, and there’s a loosely choreographed dancing sequence (which Oooglemore typically funks out off), as well as a timely use of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries. For the most part, however, this piece relies entirely on the silent characterisations of its cast. We gradually grow to like Jeramee, Hartleby and Oooglemore. Their individual foibles can even be touching, such as when Oooglemore slowly learns to catch a ball, but on the whole it’s simply a delicious 50 minutes of innocent, uncomplicated slapstick giggles.

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Overleaf: Watch the trailer for Jeramee, Hartleby and Oooglemore

Few Brightonians now set off in boats from what was formerly the fishing village of Brighthelmstone. Not many of us even get as far as the Pier.

New Orleans musicians are diplomats as well these days. The Crescent City’s greatest son, Louis Armstrong, once made a live album, Ambassador Satch, in which, backed by the State Department, he toured post-war Europe as the finest the USA had to offer. His nation’s apartheid reality soon made him threaten to withdraw this national service, and he became similarly bitter towards a hometown as racist as anywhere in America.

There is a moment in Under The Skin when it’s finally revealed what happens to the men Scarlett Johannsson’s deadpan alien has been seducing and bringing back to her various crash pads. In the strange gloop-scape these unfortunate individuals find themselves in a loud, sense-stabbing cinematic shock is delivered, followed by minutes of the screen taken over by shots of slow, floating beauty. During this sequence the London Sinfonietta, conducted by Mica Levi, who wrote the film’s score, comes into its own, giving the key moment a seismic physical punch.

Classically trained to a high level, Levi has always pushed at the musical envelope. Her band Micachu and the Shapes prided themselves on deconstructing pop music on oddball instruments, attempting to reinvent that which is now almost impossible to reinvent. She was, then, a perfect fit for Jonathan Glazer, a director who seems to only make feature films if he can imprint his own very particular vision upon them, untampered. Otherwise he’s quite happy making a living in TV ads and music videos.

Levi's music relies on the queasiness of dissonant strings

Of Glazer’s three films, one is the stately, not entirely successful 2004 experiment, Birth, starring Nicole Kidman and Lauren Bacall, but the other two are off-the-wall masterpieces that turn their chosen genres upside-down: Sexy Beast, a zingingly fresh take on the Brit gangster flick with Ray Winstone and Ben Kingsley, and this one, which thrusts science-fiction into grimy social realism, realising a jarring, dramatic reinvention.

Set in Glasgow, the great coup at the heart of Under The Skin is that one of the world's most feted and attractive women, Scarlett Johansson, plays the blankly observational alien creature at its heart. She does so with tremendous aplomb, capturing this being’s otherness in one of her finest, most low key performances, walking incongruously through a banal Scottish urban and suburban everyday of shopping malls and grey streets, where Claire’s Accessories and the like are clearly visible. It’s a unique and different film, meditating on sex, masculinity, remoteness, beauty and much else, yet a very simple tale really. It has already been reviewed twice on theartsdesk so from hereon I shall focus on this particular showing.

Levi’s music relies on the queasiness of dissonant strings and a plodding, dirge-like, muffled, wooden beat that radiates threat. The London Sinfonietta rise to the challenge, recreating the soundtrack’s droning disquietude, sounding almost like experimental electronica although, while there are synthesizers on stage, it seems to be mostly organic. In truth, however, it’s a film that doesn’t necessarily benefit hugely from such a performance. And there are niggles with the logistics. The screen could have been bigger, certainly, and the central placement of Levi, with her brightly lit lectern of music directly beneath the action was distracting. While the whole event, with its human injection of (very occasional) group laughter and communal applause, was enjoyable, Levi’s music is all mood, rather than the orchestrated, hummable suites of some film composers, thus this mesmerizing film, given its sense of isolation and slow cinema verité bleakness, would be equally – or, possibly, even more – potent at home on a decent flat-screen TV.

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Overleaf: watch Under The Skin trailer