A Tit Show manages to make boobs boring. Impressive, right? However little I enjoyed this show, I can’t help but heap praise on this particular point, bought at the cost of forty-five minutes of bizarre and – at times – barely bearable performance.

It opens with Moa Johansson pulling plastic ribbon from the party-hat-cum-bra of Laura Graham Anderson, then proceeds through a series of increasingly surreal set pieces. One of the duller monologues has Johansson telling us that “this is a show about tits”. There’s a smattering of other words (“boobs”, “breasts”, “globes” and “apples” too) and for a happy moment I thought A Tit Show was going to offer some spot-on social commentary. The words we use for body parts are intensely political, after all. By listing the grim and grisly words that we use for women’s ‘axe wounds’ (or other body parts) as Naomi Wolf does in Vagina, one could make a point about objectification or taboo or embodiment or… something. Alternatively, you could just parrot words and expect it to add up to something meaningful (hint: Mojo Company chose the latter).

A Tit Show delights in repetition. It is so replete with repeated and repetitive scenes that our attention is focused on the minute detail of each action: the sound and sensation of ripping sellotape, sellotaping balloons to ribbon, taping print-outs to the walls, plastering poster paint and then glitter on to each tit, printing paint-covered tits on to paper again and again and again. These actions are performed too amateurishly, with too little finesse and too many accidentally-popped balloons for these cycles of images to amaze. In this regard, it’s much closer to performance art than theatre. If you re-housed A Tit Show in a modern art gallery it would be easier to accept as a series of visual artefacts. In a theatre, however, we expect something smarter, sharper and a hell of a lot more story-telling.

A Tit Show draws, at least partly, upon verbatim theatre. It sounds like we are hearing people’s (men’s?) comments about women’s (the writer/performers’) breasts, stitched together into a long monologue. This technique – which works wonderfully in masters of verbatim like Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues – picks up on the odd brilliance of ordinary people’s words. It works when people say things in artless yet revealing ways, offering the audience a thrill of verisimilitude and the prospect of hidden truths. But Johansson’s verbatim statements are bland, and there are remarkably few of them if they are supposed to stand for wider cultural tropes. Art may tend to unite both truth and beauty, but these mild phwoars and quoted cors hover distinctly around the ‘authentic’ end of the spectrum as opposed to the beautiful. With the exception of a single line (“I said you’re going to have to start calling them breasts for this to work”), I was left unmoved by what I suppose are intended to be taboo-busting, myth-crunching statements. Furthermore, when every line is read off a sheet of A4 paper, it’s hard to switch off the part of your brain that is waiting to hear where the nearest fire exit is.

In the absence of verbal poeticism, we are left to dwell with the visual. It’s an absolute feast of strange and sparkly scenes featuring tits used “as a shelf”, as “a hammer”, as a hiding place for imaginary ballpoint pens. Is it intended to de-sexualise the breast, to revel in its abundant forms and possible uses? I suspect so.  But whatever philosophical project underpins this show, it gets lost in the haze and sparkle. The camp aesthetic is strong – the performers wear huge wigs, daub glitter gaily around like they’re trying to cover something up, dance whimsically with balloons and rock out to nineties dance music.

It’s high energy, and it makes you sweat just watching them, but for all of its ceaseless motion it doesn’t manage to move any meaning along. I am left with a sense of exhaustion and awkwardness, impressed by the actors’ bravery (#FreeTheNipple would like what they see here) but uncertain as to what all the smearing, bedazzling and shaking of tits is meant to signify.

Like Gilbert and George drinking gin or Dietmar Krumrey spinning around with a microphone, I don’t doubt that there’s deep meaning here. I just could have used some help digging it out.

A Tit Show is playing the Etcetera Theatre until 19 August as part of the Camden Fringe. For more information and tickets, see the Camden Fringe website. Photo: Mojo Company.