As Britain seeks to finalise its divorce from the EU, an inaugural festival celebrates the best of European theatre and its influence on the UK. A Piece of the Continent was created by the Actors Centre and Voila! Europe, as a response to Brexit and the idea of putting a picket fence around Britain’s creative life. It shows that culture is at its greatest when it cross-pollinates. The first three shows in the festival encompass big, universal themes – #MeToo, dementia, religious dogma – and what unifies these hour-long productions is their inventive form.

A Voice (★★★★☆) is the story of a 1960s French singer, Angèle, controlled by François, a predatory impresario, and framed as a cabaret-style musical. Its writer, Anne Bertreau, plays Angèle with a wide-eyed credulousness that is filled with pathos. In her mid-20s but already jaded, she looks back at their relationship with growing horror: “My life became his life, my body became his body.”

Cabaret filled with pathos … A Voice

Her physical vulnerability is captured as she changes from one glittery dress to the next, pale and exposed in bra and underwear in front of the audience and François’s ogling eyes. An illegal abortion is shown symbolically – a clean white sheet twisted around Bertreau’s waist – and in between the scenes of suffering there are songs, stunningly performed by Bertreau.

Dark Matter (★★☆☆☆) is just as moving in its subject matter. Developed by Vertebra, a London-based ensemble of European theatre-makers, this is a story about Alfie, an astrophysicist who is now in a nursing home with dementia. He is played by a puppet and his words spoken – for the main – by head puppeteer Adam Courting. Though fully clothed, Alfie resembles Ron Mueck’s tender, shrunken sculpture Dead Dad, and his doll-like fragility becomes the most moving element of the play.

The depiction of dementia, with its hallucinatory aspects, sudden changes of mood and conflations of past and present, has been deeply researched and there are wonderfully whimsical connections between the mysteries of space and the dark matter of the human brain. But these metaphysical musings are too many and the physical theatre can be unrefined or overplayed.

Don’t You Dare! (★★★★☆) is a history play set in the commedia dell’arte tradition and revolving around an actress condemned as a witch. Yet it is the most contemporary of the three in its (sometimes heavy-handed) references to a divided, xenophobic Europe and the dangers of patriarchy and dogmatism. The script includes mentions of pussy-grabbing and making “the church great again”.

‘Making the church great again’ … Don’t You Dare!

Written, directed and performed by Chiara D’Anna for Italy’s Panta Rei Theatre, the show is buoyed by her abundant charisma and a glinty-eyed archness. She switches between characters, many of whom are comic grotesques (a church inquisitor, a soldier, an old woman, a church PR man called Gino), with camp exuberance and funny asides.

Gino is the best creation; a cross between Joseph Goebbels and Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat who wears a gold medallion crucifix and sunglasses and speaks contemptuously of “too much tolerance”. In a riotous skit he tries to sell “two saints for the price of one” to the audience. They will “protect you from immigrants, asylum seekers, Europeans. They will also protect you from feminism, Marxism, Corbynism, postmodernism … You’re covered!”

Together the plays become stronger than the sum of their parts – perhaps a good analogy for the European Union itself.