Proving the unholy combination of cabaret laughs, top quality puppetry and a late-night vibe is a stylish offer for the Fringe, Blind Summit’s new show returns to their roots – as seen in 2005’s breakthrough show Lowlife – by selling high-class puppetry to entranced Edinburgh crowds. There’s a lot of puppetry about on this year’s Fringe, conjuring bizarre and monstrous figures, peopling stories of wonderful new worlds or just bulking out a cast list otherwise too pricey for the small-scale; but this show doesn’t just employ puppetry, it’s about puppetry. It’s a brilliant idea to deconstruct the bunraku form (a term unfamiliar to most British audiences that refers to the detailed manipulation of a single figure, usually on a tabletop by three performers) by creating a play revolving around one isolated character whose fundamental obstacle is his table. In the first ten minutes we are given a definition of bunraku and an illustration of the core principles of effective animation (focus, fixed point, and breath, if you were wondering). And the story, such as it is, is constantly interrupted by demonstrations of formal grace and skill as the table is tilted and lifted, its length paced or used as a dancefloor as our figure executes some funky moves.
Make no mistake, this is a masterclass in puppetry skills – in particular it’s an absolute joy to watch company founders Mark Down (head and left hand) and Nick Barnes (feet) animating together in complete synergy and flow. If the third performer (right hand and bum Sean Garrat) occasionally looks a bit anxious this only heightens our awareness of the immense skilfulness we’re observing. But what employment is it being put to? The material is highly self-referential: the beautifully characterful cardboard head claims ‘my backstory is a box’ and despite tantalising hints of development suggested in his plea for recognition from the mysterious woman who sits at his table, the company revert too quickly to puppetry in-jokes and stylistic demonstration. It may be true that the evocative image of a woman crawling on all fours across the stage is inspired by Yves Klein, but I can’t help suspecting the image was constructed more as a pretext to illustrate puppetry skills as the old man is thrown about by her physical exertions. Likewise the scenario of a lone figure buffeted by powers beyond his control sits, as the company identify, in Beckett territory, but the focus on his plight seems too fleeting, too ready to slip into the next routine to really mine the philosophical or emotional depths of his situation.
This performance closes rather abruptly after 45 minutes and the show shifts into two further sketches, only thinly related to the first. We get more of a sense of the whole company of four working together in these sketches and they establish a pleasing gentle clowning presence, but it’s hard not to feel this work has been tacked on. Both sketches are skilful and entertaining, taking the show into different puppetry territory (the abstract animation of a number of the companies trademark heads and hands dancing in and out of up-lit picture frames in the style of European black-light theatre, and an animated storyboard sequence whose steadily emerging pieces of paper provide some comedic but no emotional backstory to the mysterious woman from the first sketch), but they lack the suggestion of depth the first piece at least reaches for.
Recently elevated to RFO status, Blind Summit aim to be puppetry innovators – but I feel they have further to travel here. I don’t think it was simply the hilarious Euro-pop soundtrack to the middle section that transported me onto the Continent. The company are certainly advancing the calibre of puppetry being presented in the UK – but what would really land them on the cutting-edge is to develop substance alongside style and employ their puppetry to talk to us about something.