The gentle strains of light piano music welcome the audience into the space, after a formal welcome from our hosts. As we settle we notice the musician – an elderly man in a flat cap who is singing wordlessly along to the music he is playing on the keyboard. Our hosts encourage us to sit on the writing desk parts of the lecture theatre in order to see better. When the two performers arrive they begin by tying friendship bands onto the wrists of the audience before assembling a handmade projection screen from wood and fabric. One of them is dressed childishly and she has brightly painted cheeks, the other is more sensibly dressed in a kind of workman’s light jacket.

Then a short scene is played out of a father who has to go to work and a small daughter who doesn’t want him to go. Using very few words, enacted mainly in physical theatre, the daughter tries various tactics to persuade him to stay. The old musician never stops providing music and sound effects to accompany the action. He blows on a horn to create the sound of a vintage taxi waiting outside. They play a game with string, and the girl pulls on a thread of the jacket to try and keep her father home. He leaves and the thread remains.

What follows is mainly projection from a digital projector and interaction between the performer, the projected line of thread and various props that appear and disappear, sometimes transforming back and forth between real and projected. It’s playfully creative but it feels like the result of some research and development. The digital projection is a bit clunky and the animation is primitive.

The musician is brilliant and his expert playing and accompanying does its best to give the onstage activity a boost. The technically demanding interaction between performer and digital operator is skilled and a joke ending wraps the show up nicely.

Caspar Mark Cech-Lucas and Laurence Young’s version of the classic poem takes as its premise a boy whose mother is ill and so takes a journey of the imagination into the world of the Jabberwocky to deal with his separation anxiety and fears of losing his mother. The cast of seven use a variety of performance techniques to portray both the boy’s real world and the imaginary world of the Jabberwocky. The play is separated into chapters very clearly, using shadow puppet lettering against the white screen background on an otherwise almost bare stage.

The nine performers either work as an ensemble or more often work in distinct groupings of three, two, three, and one. Matthew Neubauer, Charlotte Holtum and Bella Driessen play the boy, his mother and grandmother; they are charming and engaging, although it’s clear that the creative team have more to learn about how to make work for children. The performance is very childlike in that it comes from a child’s perspective but few opportunities are taken to reach out to and engage children in the audience. Louise Farnall, Lia Lee and Matt Aldridge work as a triple act of Borogoves, Polly Cohen and Vincenzo Monachello are the momeraths and Ally Rooms is the doctor.

The performance is episodic and whimsical as you would expect, costumes and puppets are used to great effect on a limited budget and a lot of enthusiasm, particularly the Jabberwocky itself which is suitably impressive in a small venue. The music by Jude Obermüller is quite lovely. Older children will get quite a lot from this performance, but parents bringing younger children are likely to face some tricky questions afterwards.

Puddles is dressed as a Pierrot with the white silken costume, the delicately painted face and white bald head topped with a tiny golden crown decorated with a red letter P. This is where the associations with the sad clown end, as Puddles, who uses his body and face to great effect, proceeds to perform a show that alternates between singing (with a quite magnificent voice) his own special covers of well known songs, and pulling people from the audience to join him on stage for various – and often quite hilarious – reasons.

Puddles doesn’t quite terrify the audience in the same way that Red Bastard does, but as he sings his covers, constantly making eye contact with his expressions of pleading, questioning, confusion, and fear, he seems to get the measure of who is in the room with him. The device of an enormous piece of chewing gum signals when he’s taking a break from singing and it’s time for another semi-willing participant to join him for another turn on stage.

A projected slide show accompanies the Party, sometimes just as background visuals, sometimes as an integral part of the play. Puddles, already an international star through his feature role with La Soiree, is an assured and in the end quite generous performer, never quite embarrassing the audience and the audience members he involves, acknowledging and in his own way praising all our contributions and ultimately winning over the crowd. On the night I attended he received a standing ovation.