Hashirigaki, Barbican, London<br></br>Have I None, Southwark Playhouse, London<br></br>Awake, Union, London

Gertrude's good vibrations

Winning formulae don't come much weirder than this in musical theatre. The world-class director Heiner Goebbels has brought together terrifically odd bedfellows, namely Gertrude Stein and the Beach Boys, overlaid with traditional Japanese percussion and chanting, in his highly experimental piece, Hashirigaki. Presented by Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne in the Barbican's international Bite season, this haunting and humorous 90-minute "event" defies categorisation. Is it a concert? Is it a hallucinatory play? Is it a dance piece in a fluorescing space that looks like an epic art installation, or all/none of the above?

We start in the dark. A rustling, which sounds like the audience fiddling with sweet wrappers, grows supernaturally loud until, in the gloaming, you make out three kneeling female figures staring back at you. They're like human cicadas or manic sprites, tugging at their black paper overalls. Then suddenly this trio – tiny Yumiko Tanaka, towering Charlotte Engelkes and impishly grinning, middling-sized Marie Goyette – launch into an urban neighbours routine that's surreally farcical as well as macabre. Against a background of electric organ music which evokes cheesy gameshows, they slip in and out of two front doors and a garbage chute, armed with a mad array of goods – a giant fish, trombones, a keg of paraffin.

Goebbels' vision is as unpredictable as a dream. The front doors vanish exposing a vast ethereal chamber covered in squiggles and spinning grids of light. Here the cast, now moving slowly in white gear, might be deities making the music of the spheres. They play Oriental chimes and gourds plus a stormily vibrating Theremin sound box (as favoured by the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson in his most innovative Pet Sounds phase). They construct and deconstruct a miniature, cut-out cardboard city and set bells swinging on elastic ropes overhead. They also double as crazy citizens, singing the number "Don't talk" and doing the twist at a bus stop in psychedelic wigs.

This is all accompanied by snatches of Stein's 1920s tome, The Making Of Americans. Her society-surveying stream of consciousness – delivered as an abstruse commentary on the action – runs along the lines of: "Being a funny one, being one not liking the funny ones ... being one excited, being one learning something" and so on.

There may well be moments where you think this is all pretentious nonsense, with chic visuals dressing up superstitious hokum. But Stein's babbling, looping prose becomes oddly hypnotic, and the Eastern folk harmonies can seem directly in tune with the hippy spirit of the Beach Boys' West Coast. The mundane expands into a universal sense of mercurial sadness, wrath and serenity. And crucially, Goebbels' troupe are very funny, charmingly tongue-in-cheek as well as spellbindingly eerie. The pity is Hashirigaki – only booked in for four nights – has now left our shores.

Life's decidedly not a beach in Have I None, the latest play by Edward Bond who made a splash as a fierce young British playwright in the 1960s. The baby-stoning scene in his fine working-class drama, Saved, caused legendary shock waves at the Royal Court. However, in recent decades Bond has been largely disregarded. Now he's back on the London Fringe courtesy of Southwark Playhouse, which was shortlisted this month in the Empty Space Peter Brook Award for pioneering studio theatres.

As staged by Bijan Sheibani, Have I None is a futuristic societal nightmare that's austere and threatening at the outset. A dowdy housewife, Illona Linthwaite's Sara, sits stiffly at a bare table in a brown and purple room (set design by Paul Burgess). Occasionally there's a thud at the door and a soft sound of splintering. When Sara scurries to catch the offender, only a starkly lit corridor greets her. Then Peter Marinker's Jams strides in from his policing beat, pecks Sara on the cheek, and embarks into a long darkening story about a bag lady he's seen clutching a salvaged painting and coming a cropper. Jams furiously declares Sara's insane when she finally mentions the thuds.

Next, a nervous stranger, Paul Cawley's Grit, materialises on the threshold saying he's walked for months and seen suicidal crowds massed on bridges. Sara initially denies Grit is her brother and she plans to murder him since the powers-that-be have, apparently, banned the past and personal memories.

Bond is concerned with humane civilisation and its ruin, asking if we can escape brainwashing and brutalisation in life or via death. Unfortunately, this production's menacing atmosphere dissipates as individual speeches bang on interminably. Caryl Churchill's recent apocalyptic drama, Far Away, was far more radically unsettling. Cawley does manage to remain gripping, portraying Grit's fear and stubbornness naturalistically. But Marinker's more grotesque, caricatured style and Linthwaite's mechanical gestures don't gel. Moreover, Bond introduces desperately strained Absurdist humour – including repeated petty skirmishes about whose wooden stool is whose. Oh for the subtle symbolism of wreckage and recovery captured in the chair-mending scene that ends Saved.

Have I None's increasingly mystical scenes also look embarrassingly silly as Sara – or possibly Sara's ghost – wafts around in a blue cloak adorned with tinkling spoons, like a low-budget Christmas fairy hoping to pass herself off as the Madonna. Several audience members sat with closed eyes, possibly praying for better to come. May Southwark's Yuletide show, The Difficult Unicorn – with Brian Protheroe and acclaimed veteran director Jane Howell – be a vast improvement.

My second venture in Southwark was to the Union: a minute, rough and ready theatre–in–the–round squeezed under the railway arches near Tate Britain. This venue's recent work won it a nomination in the Up And Coming category of the Empty Space Awards. Furthermore, Adam Kimmel's previous play, Ground Zero, was runner-up in the esteemed Verity Bargate prize for fledgling dramatists. But, alas, Kimmel's Awake proves a duff production and an enervating (not to say soporific) study of sleep deprivation.

Kimmel cuts between his doomed hero Simon's disintegrating relationship with girlfriend Laura, his hideously boring office job, and his fantasy companions. In a shabby virtual cabaret club, somewhere between a chat room and Hotel California, the spirits of Simon and other gloomy insomniacs gather and half-encourage each other to make a fresh start. His attractive but frosty boss turns up there.

Although there are some surprising plot twists and you get the distinct feeling this playwright is writing from personal experience, the cabaret is desperately dreary, with wobbly artistes struggling to be abrasive and sultry. The satire of office types is crude, and most of the dialogue is disappointingly banal and soapy. Eloise Howe does her best to care energetically as Laura, and Steve Cornthwaite is affable as Simon, but he lacks any sense of acute desperation. Stay home and snooze in comfort.

k.bassett@independent.co.uk

'Have I None': Southwark Playhouse, London SE1 (020 7620 3494), to Sat; 'Awake': Union, London SE1 (020 7261 9876), to Sat