Masculinity, whether toxic or in crisis (but never ever problem-free), is a hardy perennial subject for British new writing, and this new piece from playwright Simon Stephens, Frantic Assembly director Scott Graham and Underworld musician Karl Hyde is a verbatim drama made up of interviews with men, which the trio conducted in their

Director, playwright and novelist Neil Bartlett has been making theatre and causing trouble since the 1980s. He made his name with a series of controversial stark naked performances staged in clubs and warehouses, then went on to become the groundbreaking Artistic Director of the Lyric Hammersmith in London in 1994. Since leaving the Lyric in 2005, he’s worked with collaborators as different as the National, Duckie, the Bristol Old Vic, Artangel, and the Edinburgh International Festival. 

Four of his previous Brighton Festival shows have been at the Theatre Royal: his Oscar Wilde homage For Alfonso in 2011; his one-man show What Can You Do in 2012; The Britten Canticles with Ian Bostridge in 2013; and his play Stella in 2016. This year he is collaborating with performer Francois Testory and electronic sound-artist Phil Von to present Medea, Written In Rage (26^th May), a tour-de-force solo reimagining of the classical legend .

“The Theatre Royal is one of my favourite venues in the country," he says “It's a real sleeping beauty of a building, and somewhere you can create a real rapport between the performer and the crowd. Medea is a pretty spectacular piece - big frock, big sound, big performance - but it's also very personal, very intense, and I think the stage of the Royal is going to be ideal"

A Brighton Festival regular, then, Neil's picks of this year are as follows (all dates are in May).

The Myth of Sisyphus (11^th, Grand Central): “Camus is a writer we could all use to pay attention to right now - he's all about how to live in impossible times. And what a great idea this is. Simon is a terrific performer - so go for the day and really get stuck in.”

Yomi Sode’s Coat (10^th-11^th, Brighthelm Centre): “I cut my teeth making solo out of stories that nobody was hearing at the time, and I'm fascinated to see how a whole new generation is right now using solo performance to tell a whole new set of stories. Plus he's dishing up stew!”

Britten’s War Requiem (12^th, Dome): “I love the way the festival is unafraid to let the great voices of the past ring out for new audiences. The Requiem is a masterpiece of political rage and yearning, in lots of unexpected ways. It’s going to make  an amazing companion piece to Hofesh Schecter's Grand Finale. And I have to say that with those three soloists – blimey! - you're never going it hear it sung more beautifully or with more personal commitment.”

Joan (13^th -14^th, The Basement): “This was one of my favourite shows of last year when it toured - punchy, funny, in your face. Drag King Heaven.”

Ursula Martinez (14^th, Old Market, FREE ADMISSION): “Takes solo lady-performance and really weaponises it. There are a lot of great queer voices in the festival this year, and I think Ursula might be the one who's going to be showing us all how it's done.”

Brownton Abbey (25^th, Dome): “With that title, how can we go wrong?  This looks like being the party that really brings this year's festival to the boil. Expect fabulousness.”

Ezra Furman (26^th, Dome): “A major new voice, perfect for those who like their rock'n'roll really wrecked. And being one myself, I can never resist a man who wears pearls.”

Songs of the Sea (13^th, Glyndebourne): “If you know these artists already, then you'll need no persuading; but if you think the classical music programme is maybe not for you, then this might be the show to change your mind. In particular, pianist Julius Drake can make a keyboard speak like nobody else does. In the perfect acoustic at Glyndebourne, his playing is going to be like being given a new pair of ears. Plus those standing seats are only £10.” 

Nicola Barker and Nick Harkaway: Future Perfect (13^th, Brighton & Hove High School): “When I'm not making theatre, I'm a novelist. My last one, The Disappearance Boy, was set in Brighton in 1953. These two writers are all about trying to find new ways of writing the right now and the just over the horizon. I reckon the conversation will be fascinating for anyone who's thinking ahead about how words actually work these days."

• Find tickets for all the above events, including Neil Bartlett’s Medea, Written In Rage
• Find more about Brighton Festival 2018

Overleaf: Neil Bartlett and Francois Testory talk about Medea: Written In Rage

Gob Squad is a “seven-headed” Anglo-German arts collective who specialise in multimedia performance. Beginning in Nottingham in 1994 and now based in Berlin, their work ranges from site-specific to installation and film but, more recently, mainly theatre. They major in using technology to “make connections with places outside the theatre or to create different spaces inside the theatre where we can talk to the audience in quite intimate ways”. Recent works include War and Peace and My Square Lady. For the Brighton Festival they're presenting Gob Squad’s Creation (Pictures for Dorian), based on Oscar Wilde’s famous novel, at the Attenborough Centre for Creative Arts from 23-27 May. It will then tour to London’s Southbank Centre as part of LIFT Festival from 4-7 June 2018. Theartsdesk spoke to Gob Squad’s Sharon Smith (b.1970).

THOMAS H GREEN: Are there comic elements in what Gob Squad does?

SHARON SMITH: We think we’re hilarious! We like to employ a light touch. Often our themes and aims are epic, and a way we deal with that is by employing what we call naive blind faith. So we like to set ourselves very big challenges then deal with the inevitable failure, and there’s a certain pathos and, hopefully, comedy about that.

What do you, personally, do in Gob Squad?

Well, we’re quite committed to the collective idea. We argue everything. There’s no director in the group. Everybody is fully involved in all aspects of making and performing. The seven members of Gob Squad are, if you like, the shareholders. We’re the core. Then there’s quite a large family that hovers around that core; video designer, lighting designer, music and sound designer, people designing costumes, set realisation. So we outsource departmental jobs but we all have our fingers in the pie. We exchange roles constantly then we keep this collective thing and we're quite opposed to authorship within the work. Everything’s very fluid.

What have you done to Oscar Wilde?

We hope that we’ve done him proud because we love him. We’ve taken that as our springboard for talking about beauty in this age and also about who is the artist, who is the spectator of the artwork, and who is the subject. This triangle we borrowed; Basil, Henry and Dorian [in A Picture of Dorian Gray] create this triangle, so we borrowed that and the Faustian pact with the Devil and a few beautiful verses from the book. We’ve built something incredibly lush visually because of the lushness of Oscar Wilde’s writing, his descriptions of what is beauty and nature and art really inspired us to make something drenched in beauty.

For this piece, you interact with local performers. How does that work?

We’ve never done this before, actually. We made a call-out to local performers in the area. We wanted people under 22 and people over 75, three young people and three older people to join us in this multi-generational cast, because Gob Squad are middle-aged. The requirement was you’re either aspiring to be onstage in some way or you’ve spent a life onstage, so basically your body has been looked at and been your currency, your work. You’ve enjoyed the gaze of spectators. That’s the thematic common ground.

Have you been to Brighton before?

Yes, we’ve been working for a little bit at the University of Sussex at Falmer, built up relationships over the last couple of years. We’ve been doing workshops and we performed our last show, War and Peace, there. Four of us in the group are from England and quite a few of my very favourite people live in Brighton. I have an old relationship with it because of the Polytechnic. One of my favourite people of all time is Mine Kaylan, she was head of arts and culture there. And Matt Rudkin who was a freelance artist, an incredible artist based in Brighton. It’s a very special place, culturally, for me and it’s by the sea and the beautiful hills. It’s just a total win-win, isn’t it - a brilliant city.

How did you end up in Berlin?

Because of Gob Squad. Gob Squad’s been together for 25 years. It started in Nottingham and we still have a little office there. We’re very committed to keeping an active profile in the UK but we came to Berlin in the late-Nineties mainly because of opportunity. We were offered a great residency here at a place called Podewil and one thing led to another. Even now, although it’s changing, it’s possible to live here solely as an artist without trying to run around doing other jobs. There’s very good funding in Germany for the arts. It’s a very important part of cultural life, the free theatre scene and so on.

What are your own thoughts on ageing?

Well, of course I want to be incredibly graceful and ideological about it. I want to age gracefully. I do love spending time with old people. My granny’s 94 and she’s one of my favourite people in the whole world. But at the same time, as a middle-aged woman of 48 in the process of the menopause, I’m losing what I had. It’s happening daily and I’d be lying if I didn’t say I feel quite vain. So I’m caught between two places and I think what this project has taught me is that the middle place is, in some ways, the hardest part of the ageing process. For women, when you finish the menopause, things change, you’re free, potentially, if you’ve still got health and fitness. You can have this whole other emancipated chapter, free of ties that bind you. In a way, I’m quite looking forward to it.

Has physical beauty become our obsession in this age of endless visual documentation?

Yes, yes, I utterly do believe that. I don’t know anybody that doesn’t hate it and feel a little bit imprisoned by it. It’s the ultimate end-of-capitalism prison; the body is our last site of exploitation for both men and women, trapped by the capitalist fiction that if we work harder, try harder and spend more money and time on it, we’ll be better, more attractive, successful and happier. It’s the ultimate product. It’s not just beauty, it’s a commodity.

You are a feminist. How do you feel when artists such as Nicki Minaj claim their porno chic videos are empowering for women?

I’m a massive Nicki Minaj fan. I was having a conversation about Beyoncé the other day, about girl power and how that space is also occupied by the capitalist machine, a product probably surrounded by men, even though the figurehead is a woman, steeped in the male gaze. Strong women are speaking up for themselves and owning their bodies… at least the illusion of that has got to be better than its opposite. I don’t think it’s entirely an illusion either. Nicki Minaj is emancipated and exciting for women - and still for men - so I’m conflicted about it but my daughter, I hope, grows up feeling very empowered by visual culture, gender fluid, even post-gender, not so concerned by the history and politics that Nicki Minaj has grown from.

• Find out more about Brighton Festival 2018

Overleaf: Watch a trailer for Creation (Pictures for Dorian)

Unimaginable tragedy is given poignant, piquant form in Us/Them. The hour-long performance piece from Belgian theatre company BRONKS has arrived at the National after a much-acclaimed Edinburgh Festival premiere last year. In its intricate weave of frontline semi-reportage and slyly subversive comedy, Dutch-born writer-director Carly Wijs allows a sense of play to inform at every turn this highly physical account of the Beslan school siege in September, 2004.

We first see the bank clerk, who can’t bear his dull life, serving behind the cashier's till, like an automaton. In Melly Still's hugely inventive, visually stunning multimedia production of From Morning to Midnight – Georg Kaiser's fearlessly weird German Expressionist drama from 1912 – Adam Godley's Clerk starts out as a desiccated nonentity, nose to the grindstone.

We're advised to take off our shoes, as the show will knock our socks off; it's the first of many neatly worked bits of wordplay about how good the show will be - “Is there anybody named Annette in the audience? Good, because this is comedy without Annette” - in a fantastic opening riff before Shenoah Allen and Mark Chavez get down to the proper business of the evening. Entitled Just the Two of Each of Us, this is another of their trademark shows of madcap physical storytelling, in which they each play several characters, with the only props on stage being two chairs.

Once upon a time, there were two cultures, and they were at odds. A forested wilderness stretches between the kingdoms of Sealand and Lagobel, as we glean from the childishly-drawn, giant map that serves as a front cloth for the NT's new musical spectacular – directed by Marianne Elliot and opening in the Lyttelton last night. The map shows, on one side of the wilderness, Sealand’s coastal realm with winding rivers and a chateau bristling with turrets, all in shades of blue.

I've always keenly anticipated Derevo. A rare sight in London, they are the must-catch company in a singular branch of mime theatre - some would call it clowning, from an oblique, dark place of visions, fears and childlike imaginings. They are a small monkish Russian troupe who with apparent heedless aim have for the past 25 years been snatching at history, fantasy, antique commedia dell' arte, and the rubbish-strewn street in productions that often leave your brain spinning with questions but your heart twanging with comprehension.

What is truth? Is it fixed or fluid, personal or universal? Does it require hard evidence or merely faith? These are the areas of interest poked and prodded in this co-production between the Traverse and Peepolykus, the company which previously brought The Hound of the Baskervilles to the stage. The result is an eccentric romp through the life of Arthur Conan Doyle, a famously ridiculed figurehead for the spirit world in his later years, which ponders – none too deeply, but with immense good humour – the conflict between fideism and rationalism.

Well, if De Keersmaeker made us work hard for our enlightenment earlier in the week, we more than get our reward with her triumphant, astonishing Cesena in the second part of her double-programme designed for the Avignon Festival.