Puppets and storytelling - kids' stuff, right? Well, older children would probably feast their imaginations on the creepy, quirky grotesqueries in Lilly Through the Dark (*****) , but this exquisitely harrowing foray into loss and grief will also call out to adults, especially if they have shared little Lilly's pain and bewilderment at the loss of a parent. Lilly is a loosely-jointed, not especially pretty, rod puppet with perpetually wide eyes. It's in the way The River People (an associate company of The Point in Eastleigh) realise how ready we are to displace our own fears and confusions that makes this work. We can walk away, afterwards: it was only a play. Only a puppet.

But a puppet with a persuasively sustained child's voice, in a story where the folkloric mysteries of the Deadlands are laced with a recognisable, gut-wrenching ache, not just the misery of bereavement, though Lilly is clearly adrift in that anguish, but also the horror, that creeps in with forgetting. After all her efforts in braving the Deadlands to bring her father back -a nd the cast ensure her journey is full of Gothic sinister perils - Lilly finds she can't remember her father's face or their parting words. This is, perhaps, the moment that most unstitches our own emotions.

The fictions Lilly encounters - and we know, even without the cunningly detailed set made out of books, that these characters are the stuff of myths and fairy tales - tease us into hoping Lilly will succeed where Orpheus failed. But when she realises her memories have gone? That tips us, and Lilly, back into real life.

The cast of four, dressed in a ragbag of dusty Victoriana, colour Lilly's adventure with the gusto of music hall, the sad solemnity of elegiacs and the obduracy of a grief-stricken child - all vividly underpinned by live mandolin music. Are there echoes of Philip Pullman? Tim Burton? Brothers Grimm? River People follow in those traditions, but bring their own intelligent, heart-felt style to these shadowlands, and the result is an exceptional, genuinely moving show.

More memorable melancholy, more haunted darkness and more puppetry arrive with The Lamplighter's Lament (***) in which the essence of a folksy ballad about love and death translates into a vignette about the light of life. Three bearded chaps, business-like in Victorian black, go about their shared, and wordless, portrayal (with puppet) of a widowed lamplighter now grieving for a dead daughter, taken by the sea.

The poignancy here is that while the light in his own life has been extinguished, he is still required to banish the dark for others by lighting up the street lamps. A lovely sleight-of-hand by all three performers sees little lights appear like mystical glow worms in the prevailing gloom. Though the recurring presence of the daughter - a full-size puppet, who floats in with a fine wraith-like aura - is another strand in the ongoing layers of imagery, there's really not enough material to sustain the sparks of intriguing visual theatre for 45 minutes.

That said, the way the trio use a sheet of polythene, a plank of wood, two puppets and not much else to suggest a seaside town could, and should, be a lesson to other companies who pile on the technology, but really don't have much to show for it.

Cue Anomie (**) , with its six large flatscreen monitors on pulleys and six mattresses, a scaffolding proscenium arch and a cast of six who are expected to scale the scaffolding, hump the mattresses into mock-ups of living spaces, unhook the monitors and trundle them around before getting into synch with the digitised images that stream across the screens.

By now, there's a chance this pretentious, shambolic hotch-potch from Precarious will have sorted out some of its on-stage clunks, missed cues and mismatched movements. But that still leaves the mind-numbing banality of the content that tries to engage us in the lives of six socially inept, alienated and unfulfilled individuals, disconnected from reality in the urban wasteland of a tower block and prone to paranoid obsessions with close-circuit surveillance, video-cams and film fantasies. Need I go on? For sure, we're all being watched. But watching losers losing it because they don't get out more is scant reward for those who did go out in search of the live connection.

Ousia (*) nudges me to wonder if it really can be by the same Darren Johnston who unnerved and astounded Fringe-goers with Ren-Sa in 2005. The publicity talk is of "a fantastical installation world". It's not. It's a fumble along darkened corridors into a small space where, behind a window, a girl dances while hazy projections suggest she's being watched by an unseen presence. A blitz of bright strobing and there's another self cloned on a further, illusory, side. Compared to Billy Cowie's recent accomplishments in 3D dance works, this is - despite the dancer's elegance - an overblown let down.

Lilly Through the Dark, Bedlam Theatre, until August 29. The Lamplighter's Lament, Bedlam Theatre, until August 29. Anomie, Zoo Southside, until August 31. Ousia, DanceBase@ Out of the Blue Drill Hall, until August 30 (not 24).