Awkward Happiness is a contemporary dance-theatre piece performed by an attractive young cast of four, featuring singing, acting, contemporary dancing, live musical accompaniment, and video projection. As we enter a lithe young lady is sat on a table, swinging her legs, swigging wine and throwing sly smiles in our direction. As the show begins she tells us that ‘People think I’m just a blonde girl, a person who’s laughing all the time,’ and that ‘A happy person is a sick person.’ Partly inspired by Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the show seems mainly to express the difficulties of finding happiness in relationships. Two couples engage in flirtation, desire, resistance, and recrimination, represented through a movement vocabulary of writhing, lifting and jumping, alongside dramatic performances. There are also some very well-made, rather abstract video projections, and throughout the production values are very high.

I found it most effective in its more theatrical sections such as a sequence where one couple argue on a bench whilst the woman is mixing flour in a bowl. This is both humorous and engaging, and the flour is gradually spilt on the floor, providing an interesting aesthetic effect when they later roll-around in it. However, the show’s overall approach is abstract and suggestive rather than narrative, and doesn’t clearly comment on the issues explored.

There are an array of contemporary performance tropes on display, including speaking through mics, getting changed in the corner, lots of underwear, a scene where the ladies fall over and the men only just catch them, some rolling around in the flour and some unusual live instrumentation, in this case a zither.

At one point the super-toned and quite strikingly striking blond woman stands in her underwear grating an apple and tells us that ‘To be gorgeous is a result of hard work.’ This came as surprising and welcome acknowledgement of what many people must surely have been thinking about. She begins manically rubbing the juice of the apple into her skin, whilst she continues to tell of the sacrifices needed, such as having ‘no fast food, only slow food.’ Had this point been made earlier and laced with a stronger undercurrent of humour, it could have counterbalanced my nagging sense of cynicism about the production’s sheen of existentialist chic.

This is a well made, quality production performed by a clearly talented cast, but often felt generalised and formulaic in its approach to an interesting and complex subject.

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.

Dressed in nicely designed pyjamas, Shenoah Allen and Mark Chavez amuse each other and the rest of us with their silly, semi-improvised spoof of Dumas’s novel. Using just two chairs as set, and accompanied on several instruments by a very talented musician, the plot provides some sense of a logical journey through the daftness, with both performers playing multiple characters en route.

D’Artagnan leaves his avant-garde farm to look for adventure in Paris. He rides there on his talking Centaur, which bears the sign ‘If you’re reading this then you’re probably riding me’. Upon arrival he meets the musketeers and engages in a mission to protect the Queen’s honour, and dash the grotesque Cardinal’s dastardly plan to humiliate her.

Allen and Chavez make a great partnership, listening closely to each other for the inklings of new ideas and frequently seeming to surprise the other. It’s their relaxed playfulness that makes this so watchable and it’s difficult to tell how much is improvised and how much prepared. I would guess they set up structured games to riff within as when the Cardinal demonstrates how he will return the Queen’s jewels saying, ‘Excuse me, are you looking for these?’ His sidekick suggests to that he might play it up a bit, and there follows a variety of strange attempts to do so which surely must be different every night.

The humour comes through the inventive silliness of their ideas, such as when the executioner tells the Queen he will cut off her body, then throw it in the river and try and hit it with her head, as a game for himself. Or when the mysterious woman says, ‘Rub the moles on my back… they spell out “beautiful woman” in braille’: it’s not a punch line to a gag, more like an oddly amusing thing to imagine. On this occasion I personally rarely laughed out loud, but I suspect this was my mood on the evening and they certainly impressed me with their skill. The man next to me was certainly having a hoot, as were very many others.

As we enter the quirky inflatable dome created for the show, a man inside is repeating the phrase ‘Get out of the way John!’ in an exaggerated American accent, whilst another is sat behind a DJ / tech desk at the back dressed in a metallic silver morph suit, sunglasses and motorcycle helmet. Once seated we are each encouraged to repeat the expression in slightly different ways, which people are surprisingly willing to do. The man is Andy Roberts, who claims to have watched the Terminator 2 movie 238 times, which is how many times we have now heard the expression ‘Get out of the way John!’ Much of the rest of the show features enjoyably low-fi re-enactments of scenes from the movie interspersed with Andy’s autobiographical reflections on his preoccupation with the film.

The piece is firmly within the Live Art / New Performance tradition: the performers appear as themselves, sometimes self-consciously pretending to be characters from the film, and it has a collaged and fragmentary format. It is postmodern in its references and deconstructions of popular cultural experience and its resigned knowingness and sense of nostalgia for the non-self-reflexive enjoyment of mainstream entertainment. It would have been possible to simply re-enact the story in the most skilful and amusing way possible, like Charles Ross’s One Man Star Wars, but this approach reflects upon and makes complex the experience.

The re-enactments of scenes are often great fun. On the night I went the audience participated with real enthusiasm, testament in part to the performers’ playful charm, and in part to the use of enjoyable props. There is a chase sequence using remote controlled cars bearing cardboard cut-out heads of the characters; and later we are all blasted with plastic balls shot from a really cool looking toy gun. The interactions with the would-be T1000 in the morph suit (James Baker) are also a source of much amusement, and this relationship helps us understand the Andy ‘character’ more fully.

The autobiographical elements feature some charming recordings of family members doing lines from the movie. There are some well-realised interactions between Andy and these recorded voices, especially with his 4-year-old niece, for whom he turned the Terminator 2 into a picture book (which would have been nice to see). He compares his father’s clearly conceived life plan with the lack of direction felt by his own generation, and wonders whether this may be connected to his preoccupation with the film. It is an interesting theme but it felt to me like a bit of a stretch, or rather, I think I would have preferred more of this train of speculation woven into the show earlier. The fun bits are indeed fun, but more deconstructive delving would surely play to the company’s primary strengths, whereas there are plenty of accomplished clowns on Edinburgh playing silly games very well with their audiences.

What is the significance of the movie to him? Why does he think it is his favourite? I wanted more time and space for consideration of these interesting questions, which perhaps an earlier arrival at the ‘moment of sincerity’ would have helped with. Still, I certainly appreciated much about the ambition of the work, operating in the area between art and entertainment, and there is no doubt that the audience in attendance thoroughly enjoyed it.