Black Milk, Royal Court, London<br></br>Red Demon, Young Vic, London<br></br>Peer Gynt, London

Governmental tough talk about immigration hasn't stopped London theatres welcoming select artists from around the world this week. The Royal Court's talent-fostering season, Focus Russia, kicks off with Black Milk by Vassily Sigarev, who hails from Siberia. Last year he won the Evening Standard's Most Promising Playwright Award for his Court debut, Plasticine – a hellish vision of growing up in a squalid, violent town in the Urals.

In Black Milk, we're stuck waiting for a train in the rural middle of nowhere. The first words you hear emerging from the darkness are those of Sigarev's anonymous narrator, played by the soft-voiced, instantly engrossing Gary Oliver. We slowly make out that he's hunched over a miniature, wooden railway station, and a tiny light switches on inside. Our guide bitterly observes that, though we're in the centre of Russia, he wouldn't call it the heart. "Things are so wrong," he says quietly, "that I want to scream, wail, yell, just so My Boundless Motherland will hear ... You slut. You're not decent! But would she hear?"

Soon after, we find ourselves in the station's full-scale, shabby waiting room. Sigarev's post-Communist Russia is riddled with alcoholism, ignorance and callous greed. A decrepit drunk is slumped unconscious in a plastic chair, and the young couple who burst through the door – armed with bagfuls of black-market toasters – are foul-mouthed ruffians from the nearest city. Sarah Cattle's scrawny Poppet is heavily pregnant and smokes like a chimney, while her partner, dodgy salesman Levchik (Paul Ready) is a pushy geezer with a violent streak who sucks on lollipops.

By way of politico-economic satire, Levchik has to crush a half-hearted uprising by his gulled customers. More notably, after going into labour and being nursed by a fussing, kindly midwife, Poppet undergoes some kind of religious conversion and briefly insists she's starting a new, better life in the country.

Black Milk is a window on a remote society and Sigarev can be arresting with his mix of grim realities and faintly surreal incidents. Yet Simon Usher's production, after starting well, suffers from an uneven translation by Sasha Dugdale and some awkward acting.

Sigarev has, frankly, still got a long way to go as a playwright. Plasticine's scenes were so fragmentary they felt more cinematic than theatrical. In Black Milk, he's tried out the other extreme and we have to endure prolix, static monologues. Narrative developments grind to a halt then jolt forwards unconvincingly. Nor did I buy the slushy, glimmering hope of Sigarev's final image. As Poppet boards the train with Levchik, a black puddle of spilt milk is left on the floor which – we are told – reflects the stars and planets, indeed all the universe, shining, alight etc.

The isolated villagers in Red Demon – a Japanese folk tale which criticises xenophobia – are far more hostile to outsiders than Sigarev's rustics. In a tight-knit community of fishermen and their wives, wild rumours spread that a sea monster or demon has come ashore and snatched a baby for its supper. A lynch mob swiftly forms. The only person that tries to befriend the gibbering alien – who is holed up in a cave, attempting to feed the wailing infant on its own diet of flowers – is scornfully nicknamed That Woman by her compatriots.

An ostracised, independent-minded lass, she teaches the Red Demon key words, learns to talk his language, and prevents him becoming a freak show. She lives happily with him until her simpleton brother's swaggering mate, Mizukane – whom she's snubbed – declares shiploads of demons are waiting to invade. After an unjust trial, the outcasts attempt to sail away to the land beyond the horizon. But they drift and starve and are wrecked back on the rocks of that unrelenting, though perhaps now guilt-haunted village.

This tragicomic tale is written and directed by Hideki Noda who comes to the UK for the first time, heralded by both Yukio Ninagawa and Simon McBurney of Complicite as one of contemporary Japanese theatre's most talented, important and provocative practitioners.

After such top-rank references, you might well be a tad disappointed. This physical theatre piece seems problematically unsophisticated in several respects. Some of Noda's British-based actors play blunt caricatures, and their mime work – stitching invisible nets and so on – looks basic and dated. With Marcello Magni clowning around as the simpleton, one also wonders if this shouldn't be billed as a kids' show.

Nevertheless, the leading actors really grow on you with their warmth and comic energy, especially feisty Tamzin Griffin as That Woman and Simon Gregor whose Mizukane struts around like a scrawny turkey struggling to be a smooth mover. Noda, who plays the Red Demon, is brilliantly mercurial, frighteningly impish and sweetly funny – jittering like a psychotic toddler in his hooded anorak. The set is beautifully simple and imaginative: a wooden pier with one battered wardrobe transforming into a cliff, a boat, a prison and a doorway to the other worlds. It's just a shame Noda spells out his sociopolitical lessons so obviously.

Finally, Ibsen's epic Peer Gynt is being staged by the widely esteemed Israeli director David Levin. He's working in England for the first time at the invitation of the pioneering fringe theatre, Arcola. Gynt is a restless boy who embarks on a lifelong quest around the world because his native village is too narrow-minded to accommodate his ambitious soul.

Peer's journey – marrying a troll princess, transmogrifying into a business magnate, wandering home as a bitter tramp, and sporadically remembering his long-lost beloved, Solveig – is crazily rambling. And Levin's UK-based cast are no world-class company. Yet this shoestring production proves extremely engrossing, performed with pace and humour on a bare plywood "road" that slices through the audience. The rough-hewn playfulness, combined with the witty, poetic delights of Michael Meyer's translation, is startlingly true to the spirit of Ibsen's tale. A few of the cast are awfully lame actors, but Jon Millington as the younger Peer has driving energy and a dreamy side, while Hilton Rae as his older incarnation is winningly louche, poisonous and finally vulnerable as death approaches. Worth catching.

k.bassett@independent.co.uk

'Black Milk': Royal Court Upstairs, London SW1 (020 7565 5100), to 1 March; 'Red Demon': Young Vic, London SE1 (020 7928 6363), to 22 Feb; 'Peer Gynt': Arcola, London E8 (020 7503 1646), to 1 March