It’s like the start of a joke: an Englishman, a Frenchman, and a German are stranded together in the same boat. What happens next? Well in Hampshire-based Strange Arrangement’s gently comic and at times moodily inventive sea-show, they let their imaginations run wild in an attempt to stave off boredom and desperation.

Englishman William (Alex Mangan) finds himself shipmates with Joey (Ivan Hall) and Hans (Nigel Luck, who also co-directed the show). Together, they’re a warm-hearted and motley crew, with a penchant for fantastical adventures, pranks, and melancholic turns. As there’s a bit of a three-way language barrier, the interaction is all physical and visual, with effective use of the vessel’s brown-paper sails and other flotsam and jetsam to entertain and distract each other in the face of encroaching suicidal thoughts.

There are some memorable images, in particular a swelling sea, conjured from a sheet of black plastic billowed aloft with fans, which mutates into two giant, malevolent rolling and buffeting balls, suggesting a wilder, darker side to the crew’s collective experiences of life at sea. Sue Dacre’s beautiful puppets are also one of the show’s highlights. Strung up on the rigging like memento mori, these wizened brown-paper body parts and lovely expressive heads, half-animal, half-human, are assembled and reassembled into different creatures that haunt the ship in some of the piece’s most absorbing sequences.

Towards the end of the performance things take on a more reflective bent, and there’s a glimpse of the stark reality of their situation, as William and Hans remember crew mates lost at sea – a welcome tonal complication in a piece that otherwise feels determinedly buoyant. Perhaps a show that’s explicitly about drifting is inevitably going to feel a little lacking in direction, or unanchored, but the piece’s monotonous rhythm, which is constantly looking for the next idea, doesn’t support satisfying development of the characters or their relationships. If this engaging emerging company can stick with and build on some of its image-making – in which they’ve evidently no shortage of ideas and skills – then their work may really set sail.

Presented as part of NEW VISIONS LIVE – a platform for emerging UK-based artists at Bristol Festival of Puppetry

Performer Alice-Therese Gottschalk sits on the edge of the stage with a finely decorated box on her lap. She closes her eyes and slowly, almost ceremonially, opens it towards us. Fellow performers Raphael Mürle and Frank Soehnle hover in the shadows just behind her, holding whatever is inside by fine wires. With precise and delicate manipulation, they coax a pair of golden hands up out of the box, each articulated joint responding to their tiniest tweak. Slightly larger and bonier than a human’s, the golden hands explore the woman’s own hands tenderly, playfully. They trail their fingers over her face and through her hair, and she allows them, submitting to their will. It’s sensual rather than erotic, uncanny rather than creepy. Gradually the hands are drawn up higher and attached to wires either side of the stage, where they remain suspended throughout the performance like apostrophes, as if holding the show between them.

It’s a powerfully beautiful and moving opening sequence, which, by juxtaposing the hands of the marionettists, the marionette-hands, and those of the person experiencing the marionette, invites us to place ourselves in the hands of the marionettes, to allow them to take us into their worlds, and to do so with respect and indulgence.

Wunderkammer offers a privileged view of a precious menagerie. These are intriguing, strange creatures and one by one they’re brought before us to discover themselves and their surroundings as if for the first time. A tiny paper creature longs to fly and finally succeeds in taking to the air with the help of a kite; a comic eye-rolling, scissor-wielding beast looks furtively about, snipping away at anything that comes close; a pair of musicians, their bodies their instruments, accompany a deliciously loose-hipped belly dancer.

Gottschalk, Mürle, and Soehnle are virtuosic performers. As caretaker-proprietors of their collection, they confer immense dignity on every marionette, paying careful attention to how each one arrives before us and departs from view in pieces that are like finely crafted miniatures. In their beautifully judged interactions with their charges they at once allow the marionettes’ characters to reveal themselves and are surprised and entertained by how they behave.

There’s something timeless about the collection, its inhabitants’ unique conditions nevertheless seeming to represent something of common conditions across the ages. Some of these creatures seem to have been discovered in an old world, others brought to us from the future. The marionettists’ dark serge  costumes suggest travelling players, roaming in bitter winters through central Europe and rigging their rusty curtain in the dim fire-light of oak-panelled hostelries, while the music – a sometimes jazzy, sometimes sparse synthesis of electronic sound, harpsichord and cello – takes us elsewhere, even somewhere otherworldly.

The whole is enchanting. Indeed, the puppetry here is so fine it at times feels like a kind of magic, miraculous even, as when a foot-high acrobat swings effortlessly between the limbs of all three performers with staggering ease and grace. It’s exquisite stuff and we’re under its spell throughout.

A cannonball rolls down a ramp and crashes into a length of steel scaffold that’s bisecting the stage. A piece of guttering clatters to the ground, rebounds and comes to rest. A mechanised accordion hee-haws across the floor, breathing raspily.

And then the performers appear – men, wearing a kind of uniform of grey skirts, vests, and steel-toe-capped boots, manoeuvring machinery and contraptions on to the stage, gradually assembling the performance space. There are some recognisable instruments – keyboards, xylophones, and wind instruments that have been bastardised or hybridised – but a lot of it looks like objects reclaimed from a junk yard or obsolete industrial process. Some contraptions are whimsical, Heath Robinson-style affairs; others are cruder, more rough and ready. You look at them and marvel: how do they work? What sound are they going to make? The men are focused, working with efficiency and purpose, doing the things that they know need to be done. There’s no need for them to communicate; they’re an invisibly connected organism.

And then, at intervals, songs emerge seamlessly from the activity. There’s no ‘Are we all ready?’ moment; they simply start, or we become aware that they have started. Dutch company BOT have developed a unique sound to mirror their highly original form: it’s industrial, grimy, electronic, but also sweet, delicate, folksy. These are kind of soul songs and kind of rock numbers, and in more than one the front man clambers on to the seating, straddling audience members, and eyeballs us as if to say, ‘You will hear me’. For these moments it’s more like a gig, and we clap along and cheer at the end of each song. And then they’re off again, reconfiguring, adapting and adding to their extraordinary enormous instrument, going about their work, their play, their music-making with an intent matter-of-factness. This is what they do.

The show builds masterfully, with the machinery becoming ever more elaborate and spectacular, so that you can’t help but exclaim out loud with pleasure and surprise. In one song, two performers dance in clogs loaded with fire crackers; in another, one of the performers is harnessed inside a giant wheel and rolls across the stage playing the keyboard. It becomes more recognisably a ‘performance’ as well, as the house lights gradually dim and lights are incorporated into the sound-making machinery. By this time, the stage is so full of stuff that the performers have to weave around it carefully. At the end, it feels like something almost transcendental has occurred.

What’s so pleasurable and deeply satisfying here is the way that through the constant reconfiguring of the space, of the machines in it and movement through it, the show makes accessible a feeling of limitlessness invention, resourcefulness and adaptability. It’s as if our muscle for dealing with uncertainty and embracing the unexpected is being very gently stretched – something that would not be possible if we didn’t feel that the whole thing were not actually exceptionally precisely controlled. And it’s also so very recognisably human. We recognise men at work and at play and we understand something of our need to create – for ourselves, as part of a community and for other people. We emerge grinning, giddy.