In their time Akhe Engineering Theatre have managed to build up quite a reputation. Their earlier visits are talked of by people who were there with a kind of giddy awe, and undoubtedly the atmosphere before both of these performances was fizzing with anticipation. Shunt in particular seemed to suit the company perfectly – the dark subterranean corridor in which we waited pressed up against each other only heightened the jubilant gurgle of excitement as we finally entered to a cacophony of bad Russian Eurodisco.

The very similar openings were potentially the best thing about both these two shows – both showing as part of the London International Mime Festival. Three figures, all magnificently weird, gyrating with startling awkwardness across an overcrowded stage like the best nightclub come cabaret show you’ve never been to in the hidden basement of an anarchist vodka bar somewhere in the former Soviet Union. In the sweaty, beer-tinted inferno of Shunt the atmosphere was joyous as more and more people crowded round the cluttered collection of brilliantly dangerous looking objects hanging from string suspended above the heads of the still-spazzing Russians. In the ICA it was just surreal as everyone placidly took their seats and sat quietly contemplating the same three figures, in different but no less absurd costumes, dancing just as they had been some three nights before in an entirely different show.

The two divergent shows that followed these electrifying openings were more tantalising than anything else – an exercising in fitting the company’s awkwardly-shaped pegs into a series of needlessly specific holes.

Undoubtedly what the company does is worth experiencing regardless of the form that’s just about containing it. To a euphorically discordant series of disco collages provided by a tiny bald man, two imposing bearded figures create a series of effects from massed assortment of objects gathered around them. These are by turns absurd, spectacular, funny and delicately beautiful. A line of string covered in chalk that when flicked sends a thin layer of smoke curling up into the air like a ghost or a whisper; an embrace that sets both the figures arms on fire; a crude shadow puppet women who with one quick flick transforms into the face of a devil; a cocktail tortuously made on stage in a series of spectacularly absurd stages and then handed on long sticks out into the audience. There is so much to love in this endlessly creative, discordant panoply of inventions. So much joy to be had in watching the process by which these images are made; in seeing the mechanisms of the illusion roughly conjured into being.

Yet in both these shows it felt that this beautiful process was somewhat suffocated by an imagined need to satisfy a forms they had decided for to adopt.

There’s big names and there’s big names and then there’s Faust. It’s monstrous legacy hangs on the shoulders of those that go near it like Mephistopheles himself, weighing you down with the knowledge of everything that has come before you; turning good things bad. And yet it is irresistible – wicked and dark and resonant and endlessly fascinating.

Many of the images and mechanisms that Akhe created to portray (or parody or play with) the story of Faust were certainly filled with all those qualities. Enslaved to a strange onstage laboratory the figure of Faust laboured away to fulfil each of the episodes in his story, all the while accompanied by music and narration from tiny bald disco cherub and the knowingly sinister figure of Mephistopheles stalking in the background.

Yet like Faust himself, the company slowly became enslaved to the demonic narrative they were telling. Propelled by this self-imposed linearity rather than the objects that they surrounded themselves with, Akhe’s tricks felt more and more laboured. Any fascination in wringing the last few drops of potential out of their assortment of props was sacrificed on the alter of the story – to constantly keep this bloated narrative rolling along. I wanted everything to be teased out, to be explored, to be messed around with and ruined and remade. Instead the story won out and things became increasingly repetitive, with the joyously incongruous techno of the beginning replaced by an almost obligatory assortment of haunted echoing refrains.

Similarly in Plug N’ Play, the idea of a cabaret format seemed to necessitate an almost unsustainable level of energy and an obsequious amount of playing to the audience’s imagined desire for manufactured danger. Flames and explosions and knives on an increasingly hurried rotation, played out to the audience like a presentation. It was all carnage and bright lights and loud music – like a pro-wrestling version of Blue Peter.

Within the woozy, surreal world of Shunt this was undeniably jubilantly entertaining and I was up on my feet with the best of them, screaming my approval and throwing fruit at a naked guy with wild abandon.

And yet after Faust.2360 its fun seemed slightly fractured. Not because Faust.2360 was so dreadful it retroactively ruined the other show. Simply that taken together the show’s spoke of the company’s compulsion to want to see us as an Audience, to please us either with big stories or big stunts. In doing so it seemed to shatter their relationship with their objects and their world and their art. I wanted to be a witness to the strange things taking place on stage, to feel drawn in by the relationship between these figures and their insane creations. As it was I was treated to a good time one night, and a famous story the other.

Somewhere between these two shows I saw something almost-wonderful. Hopefully next time the company return I’ll experience it in all its simple, magnificent beauty.

The London International Mime Festival runs until 25 January 2009.