Woyzeck, Barbican, London <br></br>The Tempest, Crucible, Sheffield <br></br>Rhinoceros, Lyric Hammersmith Studio, London

Great fashion show, but what about the plot?

Splashes of colour – a burst of scarlet or a streak of acid yellow – can feel like violent blows. They hit you between the eyes in Woyzeck as staged by America's famed avant-garde artist-turned-director, Robert Wilson. This is conjoined with a new rock opera score by Tom Waits and his wife, Kathleen Brennan, in a startling production imported for the Barbican's international BITE season (with an English-speaking cast from Copenhagen's Betty Nansen Theatre).

To deal first with Wilson's visuals: his production is a stunning take on Georg Büchner's groundbreaking 1830's proletarian tragedy about an army barber who goes murderously crazy, having been remorselessly ill-fed as a medical guinea pig and cuckolded by his beloved, Marie. Wilson's symbolic sets, while exploring the sheer emotional impact of vivid hues, dazzlingly combine minimalism and expressionism (with allusions to Kandinsky and The Cabinet of Caligari). For instance, as Jens Jørn Spottag's Woyzeck clasps Kaya Brüel's Marie, a vast screen behind them glows green then crimson, unsettlingly suggesting hope and virulent jealousy, love and burning rage. Elsewhere, as Woyzeck runs mechanically, with a scissoring motion, towards his doomed final lakeside scene with Marie, he passes silhouetted houses which float on their sides or upside-down with their pointed roofs like arrows driving him towards the lower depths. Seen through Woyzeck's eyes, every local also looks like a grotesque from a fairy tale or decadent Berlin cabaret. Marie is an ultra-gothic vamp while his vile superiors scuttle like beetles and scorpions in stiffened tailcoats.

One drawback is that this stylised freak show at points looks excessively like the West End hit, Shockheaded Peter. And the story's occasionally unclear. More problematic is the fact that you could be watching a slick, post-modern fashion parade. Without any actual grimy squalor in sight you forget that Büchner's original script was based on a bleak real-life homicide. Spottag, staring ahead with no expression, seems a moonfaced automaton inspiring neither human sympathy nor angst. And, generally, the slashing of Büchner's already fragmentary dialogue doesn't help anyone flesh out their characters.

However, Waits and Brennan's almost sung-through score – starting with "Misery's the River of the World" – gets under your skin with its dark, sleazy and cynical tone (owing a fair bit to Kurt Weill) and its terrific gravelly vocals (with the singer himself making, I believe, a cameo contribution as the rasping voice of a fairground monkey). The composers' eclectic mixes amount to a fascinating musical journey, sliding from Middle European folk tunes and carols to sentimental Broadway numbers, undermined by cacophonies and industrial, pumping bass lines. Many of the cast are having a blast too: Brüel is husky, sour and fantastically slinky while her smarmy lover, Tom Jensen's drum major, strikes poses like a monstrous cross between Elvis and the Devil. BITE deserves resounding applause for bringing us such alternative international work. The pity is Woyzeck's run was so short that it's over already.

From an ill-used soldier we leap to toiling sailors and irate aristocrats on board the ship that Prospero wrecks at the beginning of The Tempest. In Michael Grandage's new production of Shakespeare's late romance – starring Derek Jacobi on fine form – there are pointed moments of nasty imperiousness. The boat's captain is rudely forced to his knees by Antonio (Richard Clifford), the sneering brother who stole the dukedom of Milan from Prospero. On his desert island, the exiled magus is testily domineering too – crushing the least sign of independent urges in his sprite-servant Ariel and blossoming daughter Miranda. Though he gradually learns to let go of those he loves, this production is stronger on seething fury than forgiveness. Louis Hilyer's oppressed, bridling Caliban, throwing up his fists and scratching his scalp like a deranged simpleton, mirrors the storm beating in Prospero's mind.

That said, the colonial reading of the play seems half-baked here, with designer Christopher Oram not on top form. Jacobi sometimes goes pseudo-native, slipping on a witch doctor's feather-strewn cloak. Claire Price's Miranda, though her youthful bounce grows on you, looks like a deb with a token seashell necklace, while Hilyer appears to have rolled in greasepaint for that semi-tribal look.

The heavy underlining of Prospero's theatrics can be embarrassingly faux and fey too – obviously backing the theory that The Tempest was Shakespeare's farewell to the magical world of drama. All the isle's a stage here with Prospero looking down on a stretch of bare boards, his "cell" being a crumbling proscenium arch. Sometimes he appears to be proffering a master class in Chekhovian lounging, reading books on the apron stage in a weathered garden chair. Meanwhile, Daniel Evans is a particularly irksome, precocious Ariel, eagerly grinning and strutting into the limelight with large flower-fairy wings (oh, spare us), before prancing round with two sidekicks who also appear to have been taking a few extracurricular ballet classes.

This Tempest is, in other words, lacking in magic and true grace. The low life riotously drunken scenes with Iain Robertson's Trinculo and Richard Clothier's Stephano also fall disappointingly flat. Grandage has, one suspects, failed to get this Crucible production watertight as he busily prepares to take over as artistic director at the Donmar Warehouse.

Penned by the absurdist Eugène Ionesco in 1960, Rhinoceros isn't completely storming either. This is the physical troupe Peepolykus' first stab at a scripted play, after delighting fans with immensely silly, devised comedies over the last six years. In this surreal small-town drama, a disaffected, boozing office clerk called Berenger is surrounded by advocates of rational orderliness. Then everyone – to his horror – starts turning into wildly snorting rhinos, rampaging through the streets in herds.

Playing Berenger, John Nicholson's limited acting talents are exposed: he's low energy though affable. Director Kate Beales also needs to reign in some feeble comic routines. Yet part of Peepolykus' irresistible charm is their shambolic air of amateurism combined with flashes of inspired clowning. David Sant and Javier Marzan – both gabbling in English with broad Spanish accents – exude charismatic ebullience, hurling themselves halfway up walls and sticking. Flick Ferdinando is also deliriously amusing as bourgeois Mrs Boeuf, wildly letting her hair down and galloping away. Ionesco's speeches lack poetry but the shifting allegorical significance of the "rhinoceritis" epidemic is intriguing. Initially, the aggressive trumpeting off-stage seems to express Berenger's inner frustrations. But then the townsfolks' bestial transmogrifications start looking more political – sounding like the massing of fascist thugs or, alternatively, representing a Sixties-style wave of sexual and social liberation. Peepolykus don't pull off Ionesco's hallucinatory finish, where the horned rhino-folk are meant to start looking enticingly beautiful to us. But Sant's earlier mutation from an ordinary guy into a snorting, head-butting brute manages to be farcical and simultaneously worrying.

k.bassett@independent.co.uk

'The Tempest': Crucible, Sheffield (0114 249 6000), to 19 October; 'Rhinoceros': Lyric Hammersmith Studio, W6 (020 8741 2311), to 19 October