Theatre: Beauty in the beast

Fabulous Beast's The Flowerbed is enchanting and coherent, but SaBooge's Every Day Above Ground meanders away from Colin Murphy

The Flowerbed. By Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre. O'Reilly Theatre, 8pm Until 24 September

Every Day Above Ground. By SaBooge Theatre. Project Arts Centre, 6pm Until 23 September

Did you ever ask yourself, going to the theatre: "What if a man who lived his life as if the rules of mortality did not apply to him found himself in an in-between place; after life and before oblivion?"

Had you, you would have been better equipped for Every Day Above Ground than I. In fairness, you needn't have come up with the question yourself – you could have just read the programme note. I missed that, however. The piece is subtitled, 'An Adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's Collected Works of Billy the Kid'. There was Billy the Kid, alright, swaggering and drawling. And there was Pat Garrett, stiff and menacing. And there were some other characters: Billy's gang, a whore, a travelling photographer and his assistant. But what they were doing, other than grimacing, stalking around, and trading chunks of monologue in impenetrable Western accents, was beyond me.

SaBooge are an inventive and rigorous ensemble. But the invention and rigour are dissipated here in a piece that is meandering and self-indulgent. The company is so steeped in its process that they have lost sight of the product: a piece of entertainment. There is no narrative; what dialogue there is, is difficult to catch; the subtleties of their careful physical performance are lost in the dim lighting; and there is barely a twitch of humour. The design compounds their problems: what energy there is in individual scenes or performances bleeds into the murky background as the actors and action wander between isolated pools of light in the wide, dark stage.

Michael Keegan-Dolan's The Flowerbed has no dialogue but is far more coherent. It is also beautiful. We are back in the badlands of the midlands, where two neighbouring families in an estate are at petit-bourgeois war. At first, the offences consist of neurotic grass-mowing and boundary-watching on one side, and throwing cigarette buts across the boundary and general anti-social behaviour on the other. One family is prim, the other louche. The tension escalates into open warfare, but as it does, love blooms across the privet hedge between the families' teenagers.

This is a revival of a 2000 production, intended for the Barbican's Bite festival later this year. The Bull, last year, explored Irish repression, neuroses and muck-savagery so ferociously that this seems like a step back in time for Keegan-Dolan to a gentler, more predictable indictment of the society around him. The physical comedy of some scenes (aggressive shopping by the matriarchs, an argument on the telephone) seems tired, and the character types generic (something like Irish versions of Little Britain) – though a London audience might be less sensitive to this, and see it instead as an incisive indictment of nouveau-riche Ireland.

It may not be provocative, but The Flowerbed is seductive and entertaining nonetheless. There are moments of wonderful theatricality and dance, huge energy and skill in the performances, and a gentle tale of teenage love at its heart. And a BMX. With tricknuts. And paper planes. I could watch dance theatre using BMXs and paper planes for hours.