Aware I was going to see a stand-up comedian at the Brighton Festival but not knowing much about Daniel Kitson, the opening of his new show, After The Beginning, Before The End, bemused. On he wandered, shaven bald of head, geeky, bearded, wearing specs and a librarian-style brown jacket. He sat in a nondescript red chair at a small table with a cup of tea and pressed buttons on an electronic gizmo which began to burble sweet abstract electro bleeps. Then he went into a monologue which ceased an hour and 40 minutes later.

If this native New Yorker were in a relationship with the city of London, our Facebook status would read: “It’s complicated.” We’ve been through hell together. London is one of my favourite cities. I blissfully cross the pond several times a year to teach and to see my mates. But, this fabulous city also bestowed on me the worst reviews I’ve ever gotten in my life. So, why the heck am I coming back to do yet a show about the very show that shattered my dreams? Insane!

With BBC Four currently mourning the passing of the LP, it’s encouraging that some artists still like to confine themselves to the format’s time limitations and its implicit requirement that the songs etched into its silky surface should be connected by some kind of theme or mood.

Fairport Convention bassist and longest-serving member Dave Pegg is a genial raconteur. He is relating how he presented the band with the song “The Eynsham Poacher”, pretending it was his when really he had purloined it by taping it off someone, thus cheating them “out of £13.50 in royalties”. A light ripple of laughter rolls across this early 19th century church deep in Brighton’s Kemp Town district.

For a decade these two outfits, the Hammer & Tongue poetry collective and the Slipjam:B crew of hip hop MCs, have been taking each other on. They both run their own successful nights but this evening is their yearly face-off. As it reaches its climax, after a series of rounds, the two units are onstage together, MCs stage right, poets stage left, taking turns to front up, laying into each other, riding a thin line between affable digs and bawdy insult.

There is a distinct art to following up an album that established an artist. Of the many possible paths, perhaps the most astute is delivering a twist on what came before, similar enough to satisfy those that liked it but different enough to seem fresh.

Usually when a band playing a venue the size of the Brighton Centre asks if the crowd would like to hear a new song the response is somewhat muted. However, this is a crowd of eager fans, average age around 17, and they yell back affirmatively with all their might. Rizzle Kicks are in their home city and it shows (especially when they later lead a chant for Brighton and Hove Albion FC – “Seagulls! Seagulls”).

It's routine to refer to violent thugs and vicious gangsters as "psychos", but the protagonist of Richard Cottan's four-part thriller faces genuine mental disintegration. Richie Beckett (Peter Mullan) is an abrasive Scottish crime boss who has built his own boardwalk family empire in Brighton, but now it's under threat from a merciless bunch of Albanian mobsters. Meanwhile, Richie's grip on his kingdom is being undermined by the onset of dementia.

There’s a vivid moment in this Joe Penhall revival when Christopher, a psychiatric patient suspected of suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, finds himself caught in the linguistic crossfire between his two rival care-givers. Oblivious to everything but their argument, the doctors continue to shout across their subject as he sinks to the floor, the tormented vertex in a taut dramatic triangle. Never mind the ones inside – it’s the voices outside Christopher’s head that seem to be doing the most damage.

"I can’t live without horse flesh, if it’s only a piece of cat’s meat on a skewer.” So declares Patricia Hodge’s gung-ho racing fanatic Georgina in this straight-down-the-line revival of Pinero’s 125-year-old caper, which requires cast and audience to subsist on the theatrical equivalent of the latter.