Stuart Bowden is clearly a multitalented, intelligent, and imaginative artist. His show – part way between comedy and theatre – is based on a very interesting premise, but for me too many of his comic riffs didn’t serve his narrative or the concept. He just too often indulged in easy and predictable gags that took space away from the deeper exploration his material deserves.

Australian theatre-maker Bowden has made his name writing and performing comic theatre with a heart, that showcases his musical and physical comedy skills, including a notable collaboration with 2012 Total Theatre award-winner Doctor Brown (Doctor Brown and His Singing Tiger). The premise of this new solo show promises an intriguing journey: we are asked to imagine we are many years in the future, Stuart Bowden is now dead, and the man on stage is an actor playing the part of Stuart Bowden. He is reading and performing a script that Stuart has left, which includes all of this prologue within it. This really whets my appetite, and the real Stuart before us does a good job of acting out a character reading the script for the first time, but his quirky looks and repetitious bumbling soon prove distracting. He also takes a long time to warm us up in his efforts to win us over, including some spoof dancing that, whilst enjoyable, feels superfluous.

The script goes on to tell us of the now-dead Stuart’s journey to a distant planet in search of a potential new home for humanity. There’s quite a bit of audience participation, which is done well and has an interesting section where many people in turn come up to play the part of his love interest (men and women). It includes someone standing in for the character of a builder on the planet, who is determined to call an assembly hall ‘The Moment’. Stuart places a sheet of paper on the back curtain with ‘The Moment’ written in marker pen and we get various variations on the idea that we are all together in ‘The Moment’. For a moment I experience a frisson of interest, but when this isn’t really elaborated on it instead starts to feel simply gimmicky and insincere. Later, we hear that there’s a spaceship called ‘The Element’ (I think), which has some mechanical problem that prevents their return to earth. This is somehow caused by the now-dead-Stuart, and there’s some perpetual time-travel experience with his girlfriend, I think, but by this point I had lost the plot.

It is a tendency common in this kind of contemporary work, which draws on avant garde traditions whilst hoping to provide an entertaining experience, to try and sneak in depth beneath a veil of lightness. In tandem with this comes the inclination for performers to adopt the persona of the faux-naïve ingénue, also evident here in the ‘wacky’ simplicity of the marketing copy. For those of us of a certain age, this affected whimsy can come across as inauthentic and self-absorbed and I have to acknowledge that the (younger) audience around me seemed to enjoy this show more than I did. Bowden is likeable and his skills are impressive, but what’s in it for me is not to like or be impressed by him, but to be taken on an engaging journey through a story or idea. Similarly, he demonstrates his musicianship through looping live samples on the ukulele and voice, and the music is very cute and forms a great backdrop to the different sections, but it takes up time and space for him to repeat this technique every time, and this takes time away from developing his interesting idea. I wanted more, particularly, to see him really develop the clear and intriguing potential of his ideas.