Engaging, interesting and funny, Buddhism: Is It Just For Losers keeps the audience chortling if not belly-laughing throughout. Premiering in last year’s Fringe at the Nightingale, this year reworked and at the Marlborough Theatre, it was a safe pick for the Fringe reflected in enthusiastic full houses (sandwiched in a superb range of programming at the Marlborough that combines great LGBT theatre with mainstream in an entirely laudable mix). Having seen the show in both incarnations however, it seemed to me to have lost some of its most successful gags: no spider sprawled against a urinal, no ‘Show me the way to go Om’ in this version. The central tenet of the show – the rationalist’s non-sense therapy – is more clearly set out, giving it greater drive and clarity, but losing in the process the wider-ranging clowning and general idiocy of the first show, which I missed.

The show begins with a fine riff on EST (Erhardt Sensitivity Training) trainers introducing you to the contents of your ‘seminar.’ The reference is probably lost on most of the audience who weren’t around for the excesses of long transformative therapy sessions in the seventies and eighties, but you get the gist – enlightenment will be yours if you do it right, pay attention, and don’t miss the important bits. Young performers Merry Colchester and Joe Mulcrone deliver a consummate comic double act, the timing perfectly honed (by artistic director Matt Rudkin with guest director Toby Park of clowns extraordinaires Spymonkey). The show’s wild mix of puppetry, model helicopters and extravagant costumes then turns all of this on its head, with all sorts of levels of humour from finely wrought physical puppetry jokes (with brilliant riffs on coyly-arriving extra puppeteer hands, and on the bemusement of the suddenly exposed puppeteer) to satirical asides. Having been lucky enough to see both versions though, it’s clear that the original packed in so much more. There seems to have been a process of honing down the show that, while it remains funny and entertaining, has filed down some of its wacky anarchic edge. Bring back the gorilla and the ascent of man is what I say!

At one stage in Love Sick I was doubled up with hysterical laughter in the front row, lost for breath.  It is always a transformative thing to laugh that much, and the memory exists as a warm glow – but somehow all this good feeling has to be communicated in a review that gets across some of the how, the why, and the structure of this very funny show.  It’s advertised as ‘clowning’ in the brochure, but these aren’t the grease-painted figures that haunted my childhood with their alarming bulbous noses. No, the two performers (Amalia Vitale and Stephen Sobale) are dressed in tight, satin-sheened costumes, with mobile, quizzical, very human faces staring out at the audience, with just that right mixture of naivety, disbelief, and eagerness to talk. They are aliens from a dying metropolis, which suffers in comparison with the worst bits of Croydon: they really are in trouble.  The description of their disease is painfully funny and surreal – you just know from the beginning that you are in for a good night. The overall conceit of the visiting aliens searching for love as the drug that cures works perfectly to contain the evening.

Their arrival on stage in their spaceship is a gentle gem of improvised comedy – the staccato Star Trek like orders clashing nicely with the swishing hands and noises that their giant collapsible laundry basket makes as it lands.   But it’s not just slapstick, it’s sharply observed comedy on the subject of love. They have vox-pop interviews that play over the sound system as people struggle to define what they mean by love. These have been carefully curated and ordered to build up their comic effect.  There is a lot of craft in this seemingly effortless clowning. They inspect texts to help them. I think it was the dating advice scene that kicked off the chain reaction laughter, but it might have been earlier, as the literally-taken advice was interrupted by an increasingly bizarre series of interjections.

All In blend their surreality into their performance – a recitation about love is interrupted by a bird-like squawk from Vitale and she held her head back and mouth open  so that her partner could feed her like a bird feeding its young. There were some great asides in this, it was funny in itself and it also fit the theme of love – which is the greater love, it seems to ask – dropping your half-chewed banana into your fledgling’s mouth, or receiving said half-chewed banana and swallowing it? I’m tempted to give the punch line, but it’s too good – I think my non-stop laughing started here.

Physically they are very adept, their dance routines are hilarious, and you are given, amongst other things, a giant cock and balls on stage (entirely tasteful, entirely tasteful), the chance to hurl ping pong ball sperm at a nervous egg, and lollypops. They make great use of ‘half dress’ in a scene where one side of their costume is a woman’s clothing, the other a man’s. This allows them to indulge in some lovely talk routines, swapping roles as man and woman continually – which is a great strength. So many shows like this could fall into the trap of allowing their male and female roles to become clichéd and they avoid this entirely by switching the genders they perform between them.  Their scripting is very tight, their ad-libs spot on, and, hallmark of great comedy, it was hard to tell with some gags whether they were scripted or unscripted, they always fitted in so well.  Well worth going to see to put a sizeable bit of joy into your life.

Close Distance’s vital portrayal of four neighbours has first-class choreography and dancing, a great storyline, not too over-inked, tangentially told with convincing dialogue, and a great soundtrack. It’s a full on 75 minutes that always has something catching the eye, the dance is compelling in that way that happens when dancers have fully invested in a character.  At the beginning of the show a rather mousy-haired man with a small knapsack wanted to sit beyond us, then after talking to us about Yorkshire tea, climbed over the backs of the seats. ‘Nutter or performer,’ we thought. In the end the answer was both –he was a performer, the character was a bit of a nutter.  It’s a device that works – throughout the performance the dancers occasionally return into the audience – we are their neighbours for the while after all.

Each character is roundly portrayed – the first a woman who has been nervously looking though the porthole window in the door as the audience file in.  Her self-absorbed song as she prepares and preens herself is otherworldly and domestic at the same time.  Her movements, in a bright red dress, are rhythmic and brittle, full of ups and downs as she steps up to peer at herself, sometimes breaking into more posed dances as if she were practicing her moves for a party to come.  It’s both very watchable in its own right, and neatly symbolic of her bird like character, full of chatter and movement.  This same song irritates the salesman next door – a cue for his juxtaposed smiling announcements and retreats into a savage discontent as he hears her joyful trillings and is greatly disturbed by them.  Later in the show her song is multitracked and becomes a full-on piece of music in its own right that fills the auditorium with strangely beautiful sound .

It’s the development of elements like these that gives Close Distance its full and satisfying roundness – Helen Parlor’s choreography never loses its step, the dancers fully inhabit their characters. The mousy-haired man agonises over the quiet woman at the opposite corner of the stage, his voice high and treble, his dancing (complete with shabby knapsack) full of rolls and contortions.  The dancers perform all together, in pairs, individually, painting this picture of neighbours, and the tensions and desires that arise.  It’s a spare set, but atmospherically lit, the doormats signifying the different houses entirely adequately, signature movements and dance signifying the different psyches inhabiting them.  The confident man, let’s call him that, in his blue shirt and tie, alternates between a confident outward work pose, presenting and smiling, and the savagery of a contorted irritated home persona: you can see the tension building up as he listens to his neighbour singing.

All the dancers speak, though sparingly, and often in short clear articulate phrases that never quite complete the sentences they appear to start – it’s a very successful device that leaves the dance in the foreground, but adds enough sense and context to makes us feel we do know what is going on.  There is a narrative arc of a kind, as they build up to a neighbourhood party, but it’s delicately stated and again underpins the dance without overwhelming it with too much certainty. The dancing is always the centrepiece, strong, vibrant and full of interest. Inventive too – the knapsack is used as well:  dancers hang off its straps whirling its hapless man around, so that what appears to be his security, his safety shell, becomes the instrument of his torment and social connection simultaneously.

There is a gentleness in the characters’ portrayal such that it never descends into cliché or caricature – there is always a temptation to exaggerate traits so much that they become one dimensional, but Parlor Dance never give into to this shallowness. The quiet woman has her moments of strength and movement, at one time effortlessly holding one of the men in the air. The interactions are full of almost martial arts-type slidings across and over each other, like the mix of social patterns they represent.   Overall the sense was of an hour and fifteen minutes packed with expressive and intensely watchable dance.  It was a stunning display of movement, sound and narrative – far too hidden away in a mid-week, mid afternoon slot.

Okuni opens with a voice over explaining in clear level tones that Kabuki is the theatre and dance of the avant-garde or bizarre. Then we see a stern male figure in robes, flanked by two younger women: his face is chiselled and still, their faces are mobile and smiling. The stage is set for a clash between the traditional and the new, the old and the young.  There is a story behind the dance and dialogue – of Okuni a female dancer who struggles to maintain her looks and fame in the face of her younger protégé who begins to mock her precise and studied traditional dance.  The production is difficult to follow at times in terms of narrative, but the dance is virtuoso and carries a story with in it: when we see the young pupil dancing a fusion of Japanese dance and Bollywood it is a great visual joke as well as being a satisfying dance in its own right.

The theme of the new usurping the old is played out in the dance, and in the efforts of Okuni to remain young –she follows an American promotional video of how to stretch and exercise the face to keep the skin supple and young, and then a video of breast massage that she eagerly copies again. The principal dancer easily conveys a quiet desperation as well as a comic effect, as when she tries to imitate the new dances of the age like hip-hop.  The performance is at its best when it stays in dance: the play within the play where the male dancer is made to play a female role has a very stilted dialogue.  I wonder whether a lot has been lost in translation from the Japanese, which is able to pinpoint social and personal unease and differences in class much more subtly in its inflexions and honorifics. As it was the high falsetto voice of the male-turned-female dancer narrating the story of the play topples over into the ridiculous.

Laying this aside there are beautiful set pieces – the two younger dancers perform in different styles including stylised martial combat which is great to see. The show uses a lot of back projection, and in the middle there is a very beautiful sequence of dancing in a city street that has a joyful flowing quality.  The production was a little marred though by the constant failure of the back projection and film to stop and start at the right times, leaving at one stage the principal dancer rather lost and bewildered on the stage in front of us. As a fusion of dance styles and a meditation in movement on the venerated and the new the performance has a lyrical touch, which becomes rather leaden once it descends into dialogue and plot. The dance and movement is strong enough on its own to carry the performance and perhaps a lot of the dialogue is not needed – the voiceover at the beginning and end is strong and confident and helps us locate the show in Japanese tradition: that kind of narration was more effective than the rather stilted dramatic speech on stage.