Hugh Hughes welcomes us as we enter the Pit Theatre at the Barbican. He congratulates us on the various efforts we made to get there tonight. Someone came by bike – imagine. On such a cold night.  If Build-a-Bear Workshop offered a storytelling bear option, Hughes’s lilting Welsh tones would be perfect for the voice. We even love him for berating the latecomers, and know we’re in safe hands for two hours of unconventional storytelling.

Stories from an Invisible Town starts when the Hughes Mam decides to move from the family home in Anglesey into a flat, following the death of her husband. Her children, Delyth, Derwyn and Hugh, all pitch in to pack a life into boxes. Hugh is confronted by myriad recollections and associations as he comes across objects from his childhood. He calls these eruptions “memory-bombs” and his project is, in part, an effort to create a map of the Hughes siblings’ childhood.

Forced to return to the house together for the first time, Hugh must face the broken relationship of Delyth and Derwyn who, for reasons never explained, have fallen out to such an extent that they can’t even share the same space during the most significant family traumas. Realising that his memory is inextricably bound up with those of his brother and sister, Hugh’s attempts to bring them together become the show’s emotional journey.

What we get is a patchwork of re-enacted conversations, film, audio and storytelling, a smattering of singsong and a bit of audience participation. Hugh and his siblings are masters at rescuing a maudlin moment with humour or puncturing our laughter with a reminder that nothing lasts forever. We feel privileged to share these recollections with the family. They draw their characters with broad brush strokes, happy to laugh at Derwyn’s ambitions to run not one but two burger vans, and Delwyth’s former drink problem. Hugh, however, remains an enigma throughout – he brushes past a flirtation with ballet dresses and make-up, and puts his brother and sister’s relationship centre-stage. We get a sense that by throwing open his creative process he is keeping his most intimate moments safe.

With its sense of intimacy and use of shaky home videos, I felt like I wanted to be curled up on Mam’s sofa with a cup of tea listening to these three joke and bicker and fool around. They are brilliantly supported on stage by Tom and Jerry, a technician and a musician who act as reminders that, however seductive nostalgia is, memories can only ever be framed, re-created and dramatised. Find the right frame and a sense of shared history doesn’t restrain and inhibit, but can heal and act as a launchpad into the future.

Hugh is reluctant to dwell on some of the darker implications of his theme. But this is theatre as a salve, and it cannot fail to draw you in. Its manifesto – that through sharing stories, laughter and group sing-along we can repair, resolve and move forwards – is a compelling one. So warm is Hugh’s vision for the future, whatever it may hold, that you will want to exchange hugs with your neighbour as the lights come down.

Stories from Invisible Town is at the Barbican Pit until 8December, and then on tour. Go to www.invisibletownstories.co.uk for more information.

Iara Solano Arana stands in a black dress and dons a blonde wig. Lit from the side she is bathed in a yellow hue as she presses her lips against the microphone that crackles and sparks at the contact. Oozing sexiness, Arana begins to describe women depicted in flickering black and white movies – the women of grainy old love songs – and in time she offers herself to us: “I’ll be whatever you want me to be”,  she says.  As the Flames Rose we Danced to the Sirens, the Sirens is both beautiful and tragic in its simplicity and Arana’s performance is endearing. Like a warm embrace, the piece envelops the audience, seducing them into the darkness of the performance space.

Sleepwalk Collective, which has grown in the past two years, has won a Total Theatre Award and is a BE Festival First Place and Best Performance winner, and its members are now performing in the Barbican Pit Theatre. The journey from fledgling company emerging from Rose Bruford College to award-winning and Barbican-performing has been watched closely by this reviewer having first seen their work in 2006. Some six years later and the captivating allure of their work still sees me wide-eyed and mouth ajar.

…the Sirens is a solo performance piece that looks at women in pop culture with all their fakery and false smiles, the sort of smiles that crack and fade with time. Arana, with microphone in hand, weaves a poetic but fractured commentary on the desires caught in black and white films: the desires to be kissed, loved by a man and loved by an audience. She caresses the microphone across her body and sips wine, enacting different visions of love and lust. She is a man trying to seduce a woman to bed, a solider drinking his last drink and a woman in hysterics. The interplay between the real and imagined worlds is engaging.

Sammy Metcalfe’s direction sees representations of women in their most helpless states, being tied up and abandoned on train tracks, for instance, with no hero to rescue the damsel in distress. It’s in the mocking presentation – the toy train set that doesn’t crush the women but drives into her mouth; the magician’s assistant forced to cut her own body using a tiny saw – that makes …the Sirens both comedic and tragic. Desperate to become part of the projection of black and white film, Arana covers herself in powder and dances until the characters form on her body, but she’ll never be part of the grainy footage. She is a woman destined to be in the present tense: the here, not the then.

In the darkness of the Barbican Pit Theatre Sleepwalk Collective’s compelling storytelling, together with original music by Esme Squalor which underscores the piece, makes for a captivating show. Sleepwalk Collective brings something tangible and thrilling to the London stage.

As the Flames Rose we Danced to the Sirens, the Sirens is playing at the Barbican Pit Theatre until 17 November. For more information and tickets, see the Barbican Theatre website.

The play begins with normal looking people scattered in freeze across the stage, a folk singer who looks liked she’s turned up to the wrong gig, and bewilderingly early costume changes. A disparate cast recites random snippets of Shakespeare.  It is clear from the outset that this adaptation is going to make the audience work. Director Calixto Bieto has plucked almost every passionate, heart-wrenching moment from Shakespeare’s collection and moulded, distorted and recreated a story, if I can call it that, of birth, childhood, love, fear and loss.

The Catalan, which is adopted by the bilingual cast sporadically throughout, seems to make love sing louder and pain cry out more. There is something about hearing Iago’s howling cries of “I would drown myself for love” repeated in Catalan that strikes right to the core.

Forests is a wild tour of Shakespeare’s highs and lows, dragging us backwards through proverbial forests, occasionally letting us breathe with musical interludes. Musician Maika Makovski is our Puck figure that takes us floating through the narrative with soft melodies. She then picks up the (at times indulgent) pace with hearty folk songs – beautiful and emotive interludes, if a little American.

The narrative is unclear – I’m sure deliberately. It doesn’t seem meant for a linear mind. It plays impishly and sometimes aggressively with genders; tearing the women’s clothes off and swapping them with the men’s, tying up a cross-dressed man and making him incessantly climb up and down a wall with a bucket on his head unable to break free of his torturous routine. For anyone who isn’t well versed in Shakespeare’s works, this production, I imagine, would be a minefield of meaning. For those that know his works there are constant rewards strewn throughout where your ears prick up and you can ground yourself in text, and therefore story and meaning. These moments of clarity are a little obscure as you realise the two women rolling on the floor in front of you kissing are actually acting the “Make me a willow cabin at your gate” scene between Olivia and Viola in Twelfth Night.

Bieito tries to encompass life in all its forms, not in a linear way but in a circular one where “old fools are babes again”. This play is playful, in a childish but masochistic way. It’s brave and experimental and not for the faint-hearted; the nudity lost a few audience members. But those that stuck it out saw the versatile and visceral nature of Shakespeare’s words channelled through vigorous and passionate performances.

Forests is playing at the Barbican Theatre until 10 November. For more information and tickets, see the Barbican Theatre website.

Upon entering The Pit at the Barbican for the Dutch company Het Filaal’s performance of Miss Ophelia, one is transported into a Blue Peter world of cardboard box towns, shadow screens and huge lamps jutting out at every angle. It almost resembles an art studio, in which the artist has let their imagination run wild.

This quality of organised chaos is one of the production’s greatest strengths, defying any constraints and roaring along at a gleeful pace like a pair of children playing pretend. These child-like qualities are enchanting and work to completely absorb the children in the audience, who seem mesmerised by the idea of two adults echoing their own fantasies and creating something beautiful.

The two adults in question are Ramses Graus and Mirthe Klieverik, who seamlessly blend shadow puppetry work with taking on roles themselves – which they do with a boundless energy that sweeps you along through the story of Miss Ophelia. Based on the story book Ophelia’s Shadow Theatre by Michael Ende, it dances between the light and the dark both thematically and literally to weave an exquisite tale.

The show’s ability to embrace both light and dark is also vital in a performance aimed at children. Graus’s comical skill is employed to great effect when voicing characters such as the mischievous shadows and yet Klieverik’s delicate and understated portrayal of Miss Ophelia lends the production the emotional depth that ensures an incredibly moving ending that completely engages both the children and adults.

Taking on a story about the theatre also works as a great initiation for children into a greater appreciation of theatre as a whole. When she loses her job at the theatre that she loves, Miss Ophelia is told forlornly, “Everyone just wants to stay in and watch TV or go to the cinema nowadays.” The horror upon the children’s faces at this point showed a new generation of theatre-goers in the making, and the way in which Miss Ophelia creates theatre out of the seemingly most mundane objects, such as a simple lamp, works to make their imaginations soar.

Miss Ophelia is 45 minutes of sheer delight. As one of the many adults in the audience, I am certain that I enjoyed it just as much as the children, getting a real sense of joy from theirs and leaving the theatre with a renewed sense of playfulness, perfect for half term.

Miss Ophelia is playing at the Barbican until 7 November.  For more information and tickets, please see the Barbican website.