Richard Nelson (b. 1950) is a leading figure in American theatre but also a consistent documentarian of his country’s liberal consciousness. His series of plays about the Apple Family, written between 2010 and 2013, have been critically acclaimed for their portrayal of the upstate New York clan’s gatherings on significant historical days. They are performed for the first time in the UK at the Brighton Festival in May.

Prize-winning author and Brighton Festival Guest Director Ali Smith can barely keep still. She wriggles about in her seat before an audience of journalists at Brighton’s Dome Studio Theatre, gesturing around with unabashed enthusiasm. Sat beside her is Festival CEO Andrew Comben whose job it is to bring this supposedly self-effacing writer out of herself. Today she doesn’t need much coaxing. When asked if it was exciting putting the programme together she breathlessly announces, “I’m still reeling,” as gleeful as a child let loose in a toyshop.

The humming is rising. Only three songs in and already a large section of the crowd is swaying, tranced out, from side to side, like southern Baptists, swept along by an extended version of “Meet Me There” from Nick Mulvey’s 2014 Mercury Music Prize-nominated debut album First Mind. The Komedia’s basement is an odd venue. It has a very low ceiling and takes exact ratios of performance energy, visual impact and audience goodwill to make it work. Whatever it takes, Nick Mulvey has it from the off.

This excellent documentary considerably deepens the Nick Cave we know. If there is a Cave other than the spiritually and intellectually ravenous rock star with the raven hair, bone-dry wit and shamanic showman seen here, a bumbling secret identity behind the crafted persona, co-directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard don’t want to know. The junkie punk whose bands The Birthday Party and the Bad Seeds once thrived on confrontation and chaos only has a walk-on part in this portrait of the artist who survived those white-knuckle, white-powder days.

She may have been performing for more than 30 years, but it takes some cojones to do your first solo show at the age of 56. Dawn French, with neither long-time partner Jennifer Saunders nor fellow cast members on stage, makes her debut with Thirty Million Minutes, an autobiographical show about the 30 million minutes (give or take) she has spent on this earth.

Espionage may have been the strict theme of the Brighton Festival’s Spies: Fact & Fiction (****), but the talk's perspective quickly widened towards broader aspects of statecraft, secrecy and surveillance.

At first sight this children's theatre production could seem like a drab story circle for bored bairns. But despite a rocky start, I Believe In Unicorns develops into something rather magical.

After finding her feet, solo performer and fabulist Danyah Miller whisks our attention away from the typical library setting and throws it headlong into an adventure of swimming through oceans, flying kites and climbing mountains.

Getting pubes in your teeth during sex is one thing. Rabbit fur is something else. The moment when Ben Duke removes a wisp of partner Ino Riga’s costume from his mouth following a particularly lusty tussle may not be planned. But it’s in keeping with this witty dance-theatre duet created by Olivier-winning playwright Lucy Kirkwood and Lost Dog. Like Rabbits is all about the wild joy of a new relationship, the secret worlds we can access through sexual abandon, and the pressure that passion, and love, come under when reality intrudes.

One of the mottos made famous by internationally renowned chocolatier Willy Wonka was: “A little madness now and then is relished by the wisest men”. Perhaps it’s a quotation that Belgian choreographer Wim Vandekeybus, who put Talk to the Demon together, has framed on his wall. The piece is truly a trip, weaving down a barely trodden path between theatre, dance and art, ignoring narrative in favour of a free-flowing conceptual odyssey, rocketing the audience through exhilaration to tedium and back again.

There are echoes of Lost in the crashed B-25 bomber that fills this often brilliant production with its rusting corpse. And they’re probably intended. Joseph Heller’s cult World War Two satire is, after all, about a kind of purgatory: US Army bombardier Captain John Yossarian is trapped by the absurdities of bureaucracy within a cynically perpetuated war where the ubiquitous Catch-22 states that anyone asking to be declared insane and discharged from duty must be well enough to continue to fly - fear of death being a rational human response.