If you like your theatre experiences varied, how's this for an evening's entertainment? Take a punk-rock reworking of Hamlet and add the musings of a bathtub philosopher together with a performance art piece reminding us that behind our masks, we are just animals. Throw in an after-show dance party and a bar – together with a complimentary pre-show drink – and Shadow House Party, coming soon to the Courtyard Studio, sounds like something a little out of the ordinary.

It unites three Canberra companies, KREWD, Shadow House PITS and Acoustic Theatre Troupe, in their first collaboration as a trio.

Acoustic Theatre Troupe's artistic director Lucy Matthews says she was talking to KREWD's founder Bambi Valentine last year about a new show she wanted to perform in January. Valentine suggested teaming up with her and Joe Woodward's Shadow House PITS for a theatre festival and it grew from there, with many cast members crossing over between Matthews and Valentine's productions.

"We created the idea of Theatre House Party," Matthews says.

The doors to the Courtyard Studio will open at 7pm with the 30-minute pre-show for Valentine's company KREWD performing A KREWD Incarnate. KREWD has been operating since 2010 as a theatre company and arts ensemble run by Valentine, who says, "We're generally quite risque and unashamedly feminist."

KREWD's works – on its own or in co-productions – look at the beautiful and the grotesque in humanity and how they are often interchangeable and A KREWD Incarnate is no exception. As the audience members enter the pre-show, the cast are posed as "sexy animal installations – looking at humanity, we're really just animals", Valentine says.

But, she says, we're animals who seek to become divine beings in our own way, though we objectify each other and divide each other into social classes and through materialism, racism, sexism "and all the other isms ... and then we all just die".

Audience members can collect a complimentary drink and interact with the posed animal installations until 7.30pm when Valentine says "the installations take on new energy" and things become more extreme in the show, in which they regress to an animal-like state.

"It's both beautiful and ugly."

In Trinculo's Shadow, veteran drama teacher, actor, writer and director Woodward brings back his character Trinculo, the character he has played at various locations over several years, mostly, as here, in a bathtub,

"For some demented reason he thinks he's Marat in the French Revolution."

But sitting in his tub, he doesn't confine himself to talking about that period, pontificating on everything form the Enlightenment to the state of the modern world.

"We don't know if he's an angel or a demon."

Audience interaction is encouraged and Trinculo will even invite those so inclined to share the watery space with him for an intimate debate, as one doctoral student who took exception to some of his ideas did, Woodward recalls.

"I invited him into the tub and we had a yarn – it was fun."

As for whether it will happen again on one of these summer nights, Woodward says, "You never know – it is January!"

Then, Lucy Matthews' punk-rock musical Ophelia's Shadow is a punk-rock feminist musical theatre adaptation of William Shakespeare's Hamlet, focusing on the last days in the life of Ophelia, played by Miriam Slater, with whom she had previously co-directed The Last Time. Luke Middlebrook plays Hamlet and Ben Russell plays Laertes and two Shadows, played by Valentine and Frances McNair, represent the other characters. A three-piece female band will perform the music.

Matthews has been working on the musical for the past six months. It's 50 minutes long and contains five full-length songs and soundscapes.

She says it combines experimental theatre, burlesque, dancing and physical theatre and that she has set Shakespeare's original text to music, editing and rearranging it to suit her purposes.

In this interpretation, unlike many others of the original play, Ophelia is not a passive victim but an intelligent, quirky character swept up in events. Matthews says she didn't want to rewrite Shakespeare but wanted to explore the action of Hamlet in more depth.

"One of the big examples is Ophelia's death – it's written to be affecting."

Matthews wrote a score to go with the wordless scene of the grieving Ophelia, who has lost her father and her lover, and praises Slater's performance in capturing the depth of feeling of the character and the ambiguity of her death.

"The interpretation of this grief – suicide or accident – is something the audience can decide."

After this show there will be a dance party so the audience can continue dancing and drinking and thinking about what they've seen, heard and experienced.