This performance recaptures the intense interest in space, rockets and science of the late 1960s for an audience of children who won’t remember it and adults who might. A simple set of two half circles, one vertical backdrop, and one horizontal floor, with a raised centre area decorated with planetary formations, creates the playing area for the two performers who sit waiting patiently onstage for the audience to settle. Suddenly with a voiceover rocket-launch-style countdown we’re off into the life of Alfie White, a schoolboy who is obsessed with space, on a mission to find his Dad with the help of his friend Meg. While Jordan Turner plays Alfie throughout the piece with a lanky precision, it’s up to his co-performer Lucy Tuck to play every other character in the performance. Lucy manages to find a voice and physicality for all of the various roles in the show, keeping the well worked out plot rolling along.

There are some wonderful set pieces of 60s music, physical performance, and science geekery. Harking back as it does to a pre-digital age with vinyl records, the space race, and early pop music, this show could have easily been hard for today’s children to understand, but Tall Stories’ storytelling by Olivia Jacobs and Toby Mitchell effectively captures the attention of older children with its sense of family and mystery.

This piece, squeezed into a corner of a tiny space on the Royal Mile with six chairs, a projection screen and a square of green fake grass taped to the floor, begins straightforwardly, with six young men and women reading out the communications between them in their preparations for the play. Their ambition is to re-stage 1985’s notorious ‘Battle of the Beanfield’ where several hundred New Age travellers were attacked by riot police and arrested in an attempt to prevent the Stonehenge Free Festival from taking place. The travellers suffered massive damage to their bodies and property and were all later released without charge.

The young company link this storytelling to their own experiences of being sprayed with CS gas by police at Warwick University during 2014’s sit-in protest against tuition fees. They mix video of interviews with people who were there in 1985, and their own attempts to stage the events on location, with well written second-person descriptions of going to a present day Stonehenge celebration. The resulting cocktail contains so much information and emotion it gives you a huge amount to think about, and is powerful enough to stay with you for some time. This is an honest and searing piece that gives you an insight into the political awakening of a generation of young people, growing up and trying to make sense of a world where brutal oppression by state authorities lurks underneath the apparent freedoms our current society affords.

Disguising their project as ‘historical reenactment’ the company contact a reenactment society to ask how to stage a battle in which a group of armed thugs beat up a group of defenceless families. The response from the society turns out to be correct – why would you want to, when it is simply upsetting to do, to watch and for those at the time, experience. However this group of six manage to create here a powerful and affecting piece of theatre that attempts to deal with, and recover from, unnecessary trauma, without hiding or excusing the human brutality we are capable of.

I heard the drive from Poland to Scotland was quite eventful, and the group on the morning of their first performance were tired and stressed, and the equipment had suffered from rain damage. After waiting until they’d settled I managed to see two of the three pieces they were presenting at the Fringe before heading for the World Festival of Puppetry in France.

The caravan seats seven, leaving a small playing space at the end. On the side, behind a black gauze curtain is the technical box and the electric guitar player, who accompanied both pieces I saw.

The first took place behind a clear Perspex screen, on a tabletop stage. A puppet of an old lady in a wheelchair, her hands strangely oversized as they are the real hands of the two puppeteers, struggles with the lamp switch before lifting a series of little panels from the playboard revealing a variety of props; knitting and then peeling an apple before producing a roller and painting on the Perspex screen, allowing little grainy projections, memories of her life, to appear. This simple piece is touching and keeps surprising the audience, the music creating a meditative atmosphere.

The second piece presents a (real-life) man sitting at a table whose surface is revealed to be heavy grey clay. He lays the table for dinner with clay plates, cups, jug, and wooden cutlery before moulding all the various clay items into body parts, creating a figure with a face. He cuts holes into the table allowing a light below to stream through and turns the figure into a vertical plane where a projection of a small man is trapped. Finally a face is projected onto a clay screen. It’s his face and he moulds a clay face into the projection creating a hyperrealistic self portrait.

The Metaphysical Caravan a great example of the kind of controlled micro-theatre that puppetry excels at. Their combination of atmospheric live music, projection, puppetry, and performance allows for a great variety of performance art pieces.

This performance is a beautiful mix of a lot of different forms. The central performing character is a dancer and she is supported onstage by a singer/musician and a musician singer. This piece sometimes verges into a performed music gig with dance, but mainly it’s an amalgam of dance theatre, singing, and spoken word. Technically, there is some wonderful digital video projection that adds to the stage picture as well as a lot of elements of nostalgic set design. Clever use of props, costume, and a finger puppet mouse ensure that this performance about a girl, her imagination, and her memories of her grandad remains full of surprise, whimsy, and wonder.

Good direction means that there are enough surprises and changes of pace to ensure that what could have been a slow nostalgia piece never loses its edginess. The show is very playful but the singer, musician and dancer seem to miss a trick by not acknowledging the audience or our potential audience contributions that could take this quality to another level. Nevertheless this is visually rich, innovative, and skilfully performed theatre for family audiences.