Given that a theme of this year’s Edinburgh Festival was “homecoming”, much was made, for the Michael Clark Company’s programme at the Playhouse, of this being the Scot Clark’s first appearance in 21 years. As we know, a chunk of that time was spent in Scotland as a recluse, while he recovered from the drug addiction and depression that might have ended his career. His bounce-back in recent years with his Stravinsky trilogy for the Barbican heralded (fingers crossed) a new phase.

There was a celebratory buzz in the packed theatre before his latest premiere. What was interesting, too, was that a large proportion of the audience was roughly of Clark’s age now (47) or quite a good deal older. Here, his musical choices were the rock idols of his youth — Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and, chiefly, David Bowie — and it was a performance firmly focused on the dance and the music, without the shock tactics and provocative flummery of his enfant terrible days.

Yet for a programme advertised simply as “new work”, some of it was not new — as though not enough fresh ideas had come up to fill the bill. To start with, we had Swamp, which he made as long ago as 1986 for Rambert. Admittedly, it is one of his best creations: a fine statement of his choreographic felicity in modernised classicism, with sharp articulations, striking balances, arabesques in slow revolve, flickering footwork, a handsome duet, all building to an explosive finale. The music, by Wire and Bruce Gilbert (including the burglar-alarm section), is something you either love or hate.

The “new work” reached the stage with the title Come, Been and Gone (actually intended to be all lower case, in the pervasive fashion of today). As it opens with the dancers in parti-coloured penguin costumes, processing like zombies, we might inwardly groan that Clark is recycling again from an earlier work. Clark himself makes an ­enigmatic, indeed inconsequential, appearance, sitting on and then upending on what looks like an invalid lavatory. Later, more appealingly, dressed for basketball and with his usually shaved head topped with a ginger wig, he dances with a little-boy innocence, poignantly. To the Velvet Underground’s Heroin, Kate Coyne (a staunch Clark dancer) has a solo of convulsive canters and collapses, dressed in nude-look fleshings with syringes stuck all over her body (one of Clark’s autobiographical references).

Seven of the 10 numbers are Bowie songs, and he is featured on film as he sings Heroes, dominating the stage. We can’t, and don’t want to, take our eyes off him, so this rather eclipses the dance to go with it, but my impression was that it contained interesting moves. The six dancers are excellent in everything, the two men — Simon Williams and Benjamin Warbis — both impressive in Clark’s inventive solos. But the piece as a whole feels haphazardly constructed.

The best of the designer Stevie Stewart’s many (unisex) costume changes are the vermilion tights and chic striped jackets for what turns out to be the closing number (Bowie’s The Jean Genie), a punchy, eruptive sequence with marching, shoulder-shimmies, struts and jigs. It’s a razzle-dazzle, but abruptly inconclusive as a climax, and I doubt that I was alone in asking myself, “Was that it, then?”