Les Mélancholie des Dragons (HOME, Manchester)

How many metalheads can you fit in a Citroen AX? French director Philippe Quesne manages seven – albeit with three in a small trailer behind – in La Mélancholie des Dragons, a curious and pensive piece that suffers from a lack of horsepower.

Walter Meierjohann, one of HOME’s two artistic directors, has committed to hosting an international artist every year. Quesne is the first of them – a designer turned director whom Meierjohann describes as "one of the most ingenious directors working in contemporary European theatre." This is his first UK outing and, on its evidence, I can’t say I’m convinced.

We’re in a snowy woodland clearing – or, more accurately, a fake snowy woodland clearing; its floor covered in cotton wool, its trees, all real, coated in the stuff of snow machines. A white Citroen AX has broken down and inside, rocking out to the car radio, banging their heads in sync, are four shaggy-haired heavy metal fans, inaudible through the glass. It’s a strangely mellow scene.

Their saviour, of sorts, is an old woman named Isabelle (Isabelle Angotti) who passes by, lifts the bonnet and calls her mechanic. The part they need, however, will take a week to arrive, so in the interim, they crack open some beers and show her their pop-up amusement park.

Only rather than setting it up, they just demonstrate each item in turn: the water fountain, the smoke machine, bubble machine, snow machine, the fan, the library of influential texts and, er, the empty trailer with wigs hanging down on wires. They have a projector too, which beams the message ‘AMUSEMENT PARK COMING SOON’ in a variety of fonts and colours. All the while, the car radio plays soothing classical music.

It’s a ponderous and oblique routine. These rockers – some young, some old – are gentle souls, genuinely eager to show off their kit and Isabelle coos at the lot. ‘Oh wow,’ she purrs.

The image is one of self-sufficiency, simplicity and nature – or at least the simulation of it. Is the point that all our technology might allow us to make a better world, if only we weren’t so fixated on cataloguing its every possibility? If we put it to use, rather than merely demonstrating its uses? When the whole lot combines, it makes a decent Alpine scene: Isabelle, atop a stepladder mountain, in the middle of a snowstorm – finally, a sight to breath in and behold.

Or is it that men – and with their long Viking-like locks and leathers, these men are most definitely men – resolutely fail to make things happen? What they eventually put together is an inflatable Stonehenge, vast and black, looming over Isabelle like some ominous Oz. What might a group of women make instead? Or a clan of pre-teen One Direction fans?

It hardly matters. Quesne’s piece only ever flickers. It takes a long time to say a little, it's silly without being absurdist and it’s so stilted and stuttering – like a guided tour of an Argos catalogue – that you feel even less. Meierjohann’s internationalism is welcome, but this is an odd opener.

La Mélancholie des Dragons runs at HOME until 3rd October.