Homer portrayed Odysseus as a man of outstanding wisdom and shrewdness, eloquence, courage and endurance. His wanderings and the recovery of his house and kingdom are the central themes of the Odyssey.

James Joyce, in Ulysses – the novel that shifts Homer to one June day in Dublin 1904 – makes his hero Leopold Bloom a man of similar qualities. Bloom is cautious, intelligent, sympathetic and similarly rooted in his family.

Odd then, that Menagerie’s production turns Bloom into a bit of a simpleton, a man who trips and fumbles and lacks the quiet sense of himself and his history that is so fundamental to Joyce’s character. Taking Bloom on a journey outside of the book should be a great catalyst for adventure and writer Richard Fredman has really let his imagination run loose here. The result is a muddled and only partially successful exploration of history, personal and universal.

The plot has the Leopold Bloom of 16 June 1904 meet a different version of himself, one who wants to take him to the future via the past. Actor Patrick Morris becomes fairly schizophrenic in his effort to converse with himself across centuries. It’s a bravura performance but one that would benefit from moments of stillness, less verbiage and more clarity in the dramaturgy.

A synopsis illustrates the complexity of ideas: it’s 1904 and Bloom is unable to perform his ablutions (readers of Ulysses will know that the description of Bloom’s morning dump caused outrage on publication). The cause of his blockage is that Bloom future has come to help him explore his provenance, in particular his Jewishness. We meet Bloom’s father, Rudolph Virag, a Jew who converted to Protestantism. What if Virag hadn’t fled Hungary? What if Bloom was transported to Auschwitz and made a camp Kapo? The experience might lead Bloom to name himself Baruch Bloomoso and lead his own tribe in an attempt to create Bloomtopia (a reference perhaps to Bloomusalem in the Circe chapter of Ulysses) and failing. If the future can’t help Bloom find his tribe, perhaps the present can, so the letter in his hat-band from daughter Milly is dated 24 May 2015. She is living on a Kibbutz in Israel, about to do National Service, concerned for her tribe and the one she is forced to oppose. As Bloom so aptly says, ‘out-shits history’ as the resurgence of anti-semitism in across Europe is noted.

These convoluted plot points are performed with energetic flare by Morris and some strong creative touches by director Rachel Aspinwall. Simple things like the calendar pages fading to blank and Virag as a Golem conjured from a sheet and a bucket. Movement around the stage, if frenetic, is well managed and the beautiful paper art of Reiko Wong provides a strong visual picture. The prose is aptly literary and inventive and there are some knowingly playful moments and some audience interaction. Given the experience of the company and the involvement of Cambridge Junction, the production is suitably well lit (designer Anna Barrett) and the sound design by Yas Clarke is very effective, battling against a noisy venue.

Bloominauschwitz is a dizzying 90 minutes that tries to cram in too many ideas and holds the actor hostage to stage business. To free Bloom from the page, walk him forwards or backwards, and investigate his Jewishness is a good basis for a play, but this version needs an edit and a less broadly drawn character. Fredman almost acknowledges this himself, when he has one Bloom proclaim: ‘You don’t know what the feck you’re doing’ and the other Bloom answer,  ‘I’m having fun.’

Every good fringe deserves something wacky, and the five Dutch artists that put this show together have tried very hard to be that thing.  It’s described as part gallery, part shop and part concert. But it’s a shop with no true method of exchange, a gallery you can’t properly observe and a concert that is hard to experience. There are a couple of mic-ed up ice-sculptures dripping away outside, several toy rhinos and Mozart albums sliced up and re-assembled. It is an arranged shambles and as pianist Nora Mulder says, ‘if you are uncomfortable, remember so are we.’ A trombone, guitar, piano, some recorders and various wired-up objects are ranged around the small, colour-coded audience, who stand in a tight huddle in a hot box. In essence this is a contemporary quartet, with music to share and CDs to sell, presenting their work in a different way with a lo-fi aesthetic and some rather self-conscious wackiness. The music is their thing and there is melody and skill in the playing, with nods to Captain Beefheart (The Vacuum Cleaner) and Kurt Schwitters (a cut-up tone poem). It was fun enough, we danced as best we could and I left humming a tune. How much you enjoy this experience is largely down to the audience cohort you are in it with. You will be sharing a limited about of oxygen with them, and you really need to join in and be a bit wacky yourself. Maybe wear a bikini. I’m told that when there are kids in the group (a) you can see more easily and (b) you will join in more fully and find it a joyful half hour. The length of this review is a graphic response to a show that, for an unexplained, perhaps perfectly valid reason, left two thirds of the available performance space unused…

Buddug James Jones’ opening words – ‘I am not an actor, but I’m going to give it a bloody good go’ – set the tone for an eccentric and fun-packed hour of biography by this talented young company. Fortunately for everyone, co-performer Max Mackintosh is a trained actor, while David Grubb, who doesn’t speak much, adds violin to Max’s guitar. There is also Tom ‘Get on with the show’ Ayres on the sound-desk trying to keep order.

Buddug comes from four generations of Carmarthenshire farmers. Her town is Newcastle Emlyn from which people rarely get away. But, as wise old grandma, (Mamgu in Welsh – Max in a housecoat) says, both before and after her death, you are either a rock or a river, and a river needs to flow.

A knowingly mad-cap performance style pairs Bud’s wide-eyed joy in telling her story with Max’s adroit characterisations. We meet the farming dynasty, hear about ‘a cucumber that looked like Abraham Lincoln’, learn the names of the villages and become fond of daft boyfriend Ed and his dafter toothy friend. There is an alarmingly xenophobic song about Wales and an evocative set-piece about picking potatoes (that must be a Welsh thing, surely potatoes are dug?) It’s all enjoyably lo-fi in appearance and production values, in keeping with the ‘non-actor’ premise.

Buddug’s epiphany comes at a dance, by way of singing-star Mike Stevens (Max in sunglasses) and she sets her sights on London. The days of throwing chips at the chip-van and downing snake-bite are over. She is going to university to become an artist.

But leaving home, especially one as remote and rooted as this, is not going to be easy. ‘Hiraeth’, a sort of nostalgic homesickness, is going to kick in. London is tough for newcomers and Buddug feels lost here. She can’t even eat out alone – that table by the toilets, can she have that? Oh no, that’s the napkin-folding table.

A fling with a Portuguese stud supplies a welcome narrative shift, but we don’t really want to hear from this arrogant cad, however well performed by the now bare-chested Max, clearly enjoying himself. It’s the only sour note of the evening, and Buddug is too self-deprecating here.

Eventually, so they tell us, she meets the ‘real’ Max in a London bar. He is her Welsh salvation. They will be just friends and make a show. She’s spent three years at university doing theatre design: doing art is easy, she says.

For all its cod-amateurishness, Hiraeth is a well-crafted and joyful hour: fast, funny, beautifully performed, and refreshingly open. It’s a personal story on a universal theme that makes you long for the hills. Any show that gets me to shout ‘This is Art’ to a room full of strangers and rewards us all with a Welsh-cake gets my vote. Legend.