Catalonia is an autonomous community in northern Spain; its capital city is Barcelona and it has a population of just over 7.5 million. Now, thanks to Bots & Barrals Theatre Company, Londoners can get a glimpse of the burgeoning Catalan contemporary theatre scene at the Arcola Tent, in a double bill of fascinating, award-winning plays.

The evening opens with Rodolf Sirera’s short play The Audition. It tells the story of a famous actor who is invited to the house of an admirer, a Marquis. All is not what it seems, however, and through a series of mind-games, deceits and tense exchanges, the meeting turns into a risky theatrical experiment. The Marquis contends that theatre should not be fiction or artifice, but should in fact be a truthful emotional experience, with both the audience and actor really feeling. The Marquis puts these theories to the test, using his guest as an unwitting subject, and soon the twisted experiment becomes a matter of life and death.

Sirera’s play twists and turns until the audience no longer know what the truth is. It is a thrilling exploration of what theatre is and could be. The actors did not always seem to be entirely comfortable with the text, occasionally stumbling over lines. That said, both Tom Marshall as the underhand, manipulative Marquis and Corin Stuart as the famous actor give convincing performances. John London’s translation is commendable for making the dialogue feel so natural in a different language from the original.

In London, this play doesn’t feel hugely controversial in the context of the experimental work of companies like Punchdrunk and You Me Bum Bum Train. That said, it articulates well an ongoing theatrical debate about ‘truth’. Yet it is also a somewhat safe production, which seems unfortunate considering the content of the play talks about breaking conventions and transgressing established forms.

None of that in the second of the two plays though. Esteve Soler’s Against Democracy presents seven sketches inspired by the French genre of Grand Guignol. The sketches are linked by the themes of consumerism, capitalism, inevitability and power, and the thought that capitalism is incompatible with democracy. They are individually brilliant and collectively profound. The sketches range from a married couple caught in a spider’s web, as the woman gives birth to a huge spider that proceeds to consume them, to a portrayal of a tyrant who has destroyed an entire city on a whim. Production designer Robin Jackson has done well to making seven rapidly-changing sets mainly out of cardboard and Jordi Pérez’s lighting, although simple, is very intelligent. This trash aesthetic is very effective in what becomes a stark, haunting vision of the near future.

Clare Fraenkel plays a variety of wives, girlfriends and barmaids, giving a great performance. Lee Ranns is also strong, while Mark Knightley brings a good helping of humour, even if his characters are a little too mannered at times. Mike Buck’s translation is praiseworthy: Against Democracy is universally relevant and bitingly critical of governments around the world. At times tongue-in-cheek and at times brimming with real frustration and anger, it is political theatre at its best.

Silvia Ayguadé’s productions are fiercely inventive; both are intriguing and fantastically entertaining. It is wonderful and admirable that Ayguadé is giving London the opportunity to experience theatre from another culture. You don’t want to miss out.

The Audition and Against Democracy are playing at the Arcola Theatre until Saturday 25 May. For more information and tickets, see the Arcola Theatre website.

I saw NoFit State Circus once before, at the London International Mime Festival in the South Bank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall. An auditorium of this style does no justice to the magic that can be worked in a Big Top. This time round, as before, I found myself yearning for story to connect the spectacular circus acts. Bianco, however, has shown me how powerful an art form circus can be, full of visual splendour and spectacularly skilled performances.

Bianco’s audience enters the Big Top stationed on Hove Lawns into a lively atmosphere. Performers clamber over a scaffold made of an interconnected aerial rig – which the show reveals to be a genius piece of design – covered in gauze. We encircle the excitedly shouting performers and, as the lights go down, the gauze drops and we are invited into this extraordinary circus show.

A live band accompanies Bianco adding to the electric atmosphere that fills the space with every act of aerial, juggling, tightrope (in heels!) … I could go on and on. This show is highly charged, immensely skilled and powerful but it’s just too long. At two hours and 20 minutes, including an interval, I found myself leaving with neck ache and a significant lapse in concentration. There’s only so much ‘ooh-ing’ and ‘aah-ing’ a person can do, a limit to the level of unconnected, equally spectacular and skilled circus acts you can take before your focus starts to wane.

I headed into the interval after a stunningly beautiful and emotionally charged straps performance feeling elated and inspired. This act demonstrated how circus can take its audience somewhere, tell a story and really make them feel. To stick with having no over-arching story the show may have benefitted from ending here, with a tribute to the beauty and power of circus art. However, I think to add some sense of narrative would elevate a show such as this to something phenomenal.

To its credit, NoFit State does toy with an element of story. Narration at the opening mentions the setting as a travellers’ camp at night, and something about this being the night the elephant came. At least I think that’s what they said. Such narration happens sporadically throughout and performers occasionally speak during acts, they are wearing microphones but it’s challenging to make out anything that is said.

Despite its lack of coherent story, however, Bianco is spectacular in every regard. Go and you will find yourself marvelling at the skill and sheer strength of every act, whilst enjoying the immersive environment created by the fantastically designed and engineered set, sound and lighting. This is a well put together, if lengthy, show and a great night out – I just think with more presence allowed to story it could be something even more dazzling. This is a Brighton Fringe experience not to be missed.

Bianco is playing Brighton Fringe until 1 June. For more information and tickets, see the Brighton Fringe website. Photography by David Levene.

There are certain things that we expect from vampires: they must drink blood, fear light, be immortal and be killed by a stake through the heart. However, new elaborations are gathering like cobwebs as we replace their cloaks with leather jackets and bring them into the modern day. Cuddles, a vampire tale by Joseph Wilde, foregrounds the agonising vulnerability these rules can cause, by making its vampire a 13-year-old girl, unable to leave her windowless room and utterly dependent on her older sister, for blood and love alike.

The premise is straight out of the nastier kind of fairytale, narrated like a campfire ghost story by upended torchlight. Eve is the unexpected child who landed in her father’s bed, following her longed and wished for older sister Tabby – her sister is cast as a princess and she as a monster, who must be hidden away in darkness pierced only by the odd ray of guilty affection. The dynamics of this two-hander are never allowed to stay simple, though. Rendah Haywood as the older sister, Tabby, shifts from being a princess to a ball-breaking business woman to a gauche woman making her first forays into dating. She manages to find all the slick, sit-com-style laughs in her monologues of city life, but there’s still a vulnerability to her that leaches out through the cracks in her patent and polyester armour. Carla Langley couldn’t be more convincing as a snarling, feral, blood-soaked child, raised by the Brothers Grimm rather than wolves.

With no vampiric glamour, she’s an earthy, filthy thing, trapped like a pale white grub in a cocoon of her sister’s fierce rules, governing even how the pair are allowed to cuddle. Wilde’s writing gives the sisters complex, layered monologues and dialogues that point at the different layers of reality they’re living in, exploiting their vastly different experiences for maximum ironic effect. Eve inhabits a twisted Enid Blyton world of Monopoly, jam sandwiches and fantasy stories that are just as real to her as those that Tabby brings back from the world outside, and the strange middle ground the pair find to talk in is agonising and hilarious in turn. Pablo Baz’s lighting design is refreshingly flexible, breaking up the single room’s moods into different shades of fantasy and reality.

A lot of this play is genuinely, brutally shocking – these magical sisters aren’t Charmed or charming, and the piece is more of an exploration of the abuser-abused dynamic than of the vampire myth. Although the horrifying revelations are evenly spaced and punctuated with lashings of black humour, the atmosphere can feel grindingly bleak. A swifter pace in the second half could help bring out the elements of farce layered through the story, particularly in Tabby’s disastrous dating life. Still, Cuddles impressively transforms the most stylish of scary stories into something rough, grubby and grotesquely hilarious – this vampire’s draught of blood never looked less like red wine.

Cuddles is playing at Ovalhouse Theatre until 1 June. For more information and tickets, see the Ovalhouse Theatre website.

Using the stimulus of the idea that music helps to develop a baby’s sensory awareness, Lullaby is specially designed so that mothers and babies can spend some quality relaxation and exploratory time together. On entering the Adventure theatre, you are asked to remove your shoes and are told that in order to keep it as an intimate performance, one parent and one baby are admitted per ticket. Other observers can watch on a live screen for a smaller fee. Unfortunately, on the performance that I attended, only one mother and baby were booked in (the maximum is 12 pairs), so another observer and I were given access to the cloth tent in which the performance takes place. It is explained that should you need to, you can step out of the ‘tent’ into a small relaxation area filled with lavender plants and comfy benches with your baby, and that the rule is that “there are no rules” in terms of how you want to use your time in the space.

Deviser, composer and performer Natalie Raybould, dressed in a neutral fabric similar to that surrounding the tent, begins by kneeling down and singing a haunting yet relaxing melody whilst making small interactions with the babies. The little boy who was sharing the tent with me at this point was completely transfixed, not only by the singing and music, but also by Raybould folding a caterpillar out of muslin, which, through a series of movements, becomes a butterfly. It is both beautiful and engaging for the baby. Slowly, Raybould brings in a large lit ball, and interacts with it as if she was protecting the world. Without spoiling it too much, the singing continues whilst lighting and shadows are used to enhance the mood, although one couldn’t help but feel that more coloured objects or engaging lights could have been used to help keep the babies a little more engaged whilst she steps out of the tent. It is then left to the parents to enjoy ten minutes of time with their child in whatever capacity they want. On exiting, carers are also provided with a website where they can download the music from the show.

Although the score is basic, it is effective in having a relaxing effect on the child and their carer, and in the cosy, carpeted tent, it gives a sense of a safe environment in which to play. Lullaby is a great idea to engage children from a very early age in music and the senses, but I hope that it can experiment a little bit more with the idea. The Polka Theatre which, from the outside, wouldn’t look out of place in children’s television show Balamory, uses the slogan “Where Theatre Begins” (which is very apt for this particular performance) and is the perfect venue for the show, allowing the babies to have a bit of play time before or after the show in its many nursery rooms. Overall, Lullaby is a good interactive session for parent and baby to bond, and I think is very important in providing the very young with their first theatrical experience.

Lullaby is playing The Polka Theatre, Wimbledon until 25 May 2013. For more information and tickets, see the Polka Theatre website.