The subtitle of Richard Nelson’s new trilogy suggests an anti-Trump polemic. Instead, its miraculous, almost invisible craft fulfils the President’s most hollow promise. It restores full humanity to a family of lower-middle class Americans who often feel slighted and helpless. As they gather around their kitchen table, the Gabriels talk and live more fully than most media and politicians ever really believe of those they describe and rule. Nelson has said his aim is “verisimilitude”, a seemingly modest ambition which wonderfully succeeds.

Dream palace, cesspit and church; celebrated, mopped (by Marlene Dietrich, no less) and fucked: Brighton’s Theatre Royal has seen a whole lot of history, of both the splendid and the seedy variety. Now it has found a magnificent if unlikely mouthpiece in the form of post-modern cabaret star Meow Meow.

There may never have been a time when Shakespeare’s Richard III did not have contemporary relevance, but surely never more than it does right now. And it’s to the credit of director Mehmet Ergen that this production doesn’t go to town on it, but instead leaves the audience to make its own connections.

You have to hand it to Felicity Kendal: this ever-game actress is fearless about treading in the footsteps of the British theatre's grandes dames. In 2006, she starred on the West End quite creditably in Amy's View, inheriting a part originated on both sides of the Atlantic by Judi Dench.

A whacking great story has gone largely untold in British theatre: the legacy of colonialism in India, including the cultural ghosts the British left behind. With the 70^th anniversary of Indian independence just round the corner this summer, poet and playwright Siddhartha Bose has set out to address this "historical amnesia".

Never mind breaking the fourth wall, Joe Wright and the Young Vic have smashed the other three as well.

This monologue first saw the light of day at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2015. It's a frank – very frank – piece about female sexuality by an anonymous heterosexual female author, performed by a different male comic each night, who reads it sight unseen.

Sacred and profane, trivial and profound blissfully combine in this irresistible, Olivier Award-winning tale of choirgirls gone wild. Lee Hall, of Billy Elliot fame, adapts Alan Warner’s 1998 novel with a similarly shrewd grasp of youthful hope amidst challenging circumstances, and with the arts once again proving a vital escape – albeit, in this case, temporarily.

There is a sequence in theatrical circus troupe Casus’ new production, Driftwood, where three of the five members sit, each between the legs of another, in a row, facing the front of the stage. They look as if they’re about to do the rowing dance people in the Eighties used to do to the Gap Band’s “Oops Upside Your Head” at suburban discos. That is not what they do. Instead the front one rolls back onto the one behind, who in turn rolls back onto the one behind and, before you know it, the three off them have formed a human totem pole. It’s one of those things where your eyes can’t quite believe it’s happened. But then there’s a lot of that with Casus. They major in physical impossibility.

Casus, appearing in the Theatre Royal at Brighton Festival, are a five-piece Australian outfit – at least for the purposes of this show – consisting of two women and three men. Driftwood is performed, all smiles, all the time, and there’s a loose conceptual theme, which is helping one and other, being a collective unit. Happily, the whole is spiced with easy good humour. A regular problem with high-end circus is that it can be presented po-faced, beautifully lit, but utterly serious, like an art installation. No such issues here, and a full house, including many small children, clapping regularly at their feats, is a testament to the fact this lot can entertain on multiple levels.

Driftwood begins under a regular domestic, drum-style lamp shade, lowered from the heavens, which the ensemble throng under, moving in a circle, gripping one another, like human waves. Throughout 70 minutes of intense, acrobatic physicality, multiple types of skill are shown. An early highlight comes when one member is held between two and used as a skipping rope for another, while there's also a lovely sequence of hoop play, 15 feet off the ground, intricate and thrillingly dangerous-looking, to the gentle soundtrack of Gotye’s ballad “Heart’s a Mess”.

Comedy is provided by, among much else, Casus co-founders Jesse Scott and Lachlan McAulay playing off their difference in height, or a sequence in which a clothes horse is dressed with much clowning. By the same token, there are moments of pure visual artistry, where the audience makes noises of quiet wonderment, such as a simple but eye-boggling piece where one of the men places his back in the lamp-light and contorts his musculature into all manner of shadowed physical shapes.

Watching this performance, the mind almost suffers astonishment fatigue for, by the end, I'm taking for granted things that are unachievable for 99.9 percent of us. There are moments so startling they remain on the mind’s eye for some time afterwards. One such is a sequence involving three members hooping, with four hoops each, until they are spread equidistantly on their bodies. It’s a hypnotic sight that the retina absorbs yet takes a moment fully to comprehend. There is much else in a similarly brain-boggling vein, rope work and extraordinary balancing skills, but let’s leave those, for circuses need spoilers as little as any other art from. Suffice to say Driftwood is a show it would be difficult to walk out of feeling anything other than awed.

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Overleaf: Watch the trailer for Casus Circus's Driftwood

Sovremennik is Russian for “contemporary”, and ever since its founding in the Soviet Union's 1950s Thaw, Moscow’s Sovremennik Theatre company has lived by the idea that it expresses new, fresh breath in Russian theatre. Unless you argue that the adjective “contemporary” by definition must reveal characteristics of its temporal surroundings, moribund is not one of the alternative meanings of the word. Or in this case one should argue positively that Galina Volchek's production of Chekhov's Three Sisters does comment subversively on today.