Two dinosaurs are held next to one another: the little one is a baby, the big one is 31; the little one is 8 – the big one, 39; the little one is 16 – the big one is… gone.

Vanessa (Helen Vinton), chief dinosaur manipulator and post-doctoral researcher, is a white-coat-clad scientist, with two PhD students that she is supervising: Myles (David Ridley) and Dom (Adam Farrell). Vanessa is serious about science, Myles and Dom are serious about the pub. They rub along with a mixture of exasperation, wit and bright-eyed fervour.

Building a well-oiled machine of scientific exploration, the live score fizzes and whirrs and the three performers click into each other, the action, and the tools of their trade with complete precision and scalpel-sharp timing. Spark and spirit burn bright as Miles and Dom provide the perfect clowns (part geek-chic, part Fresh Meat) to Vanessa’s grit and drive. Helen Vinton plays Vanessa with perfect steeliness, with Ridley and Farrell picking up the other characters in her story with agility. Vanessa’s dreams are clear: she is going to be a tenured professor by the time she is 35. But that’s before the Loch Ness monster rears its head.  Again.

The calls begin once more: the Daily Mail, the this, the that. Vanessa shuns and spurns the approaches until Nature magazine calls: it is the very beacon of scientific journalism, the Guardian of the white-coat world. They ask her to write a feature article about the Loch Ness monster – the subject of her father’s own scientific research. Vanessa cannot refuse and heads off on her journey that not only thrusts her into the mystery of Loch Ness, but also into her missing father: a creature no less elusive than the monster itself.

When Vanessa, Dom and the story head up the A1 and into the depths of Loch Ness, she comes across her father’s old caravan, now inhabited by her father’s co-monster hunter, Brian. She finds a jumper of her dad’s and puts it on: it is an understated moment of real sadness and veiled hope…

Crafted with clear theatrical confidence by director Nel Crouch and designer Rebecca Jane Wood, the tools of the scientific world – tanks of water, pipettes, beakers – become the storyteller’s kit. The tanks of water become the pond; when Vanessa and Dom step into the water, they splash each other with water from their pipettes. Models of dinosaurs – those monuments to the past – are manipulated to play other characters in the unfolding tale.

Fossils is a beautifully hewn story about how we connect to the past, and how our lives are shaped by the no-longer living things we carry with us. The emotion creeps up on you, gently and without fanfare:  the tricks, wit and japes of the initial theatrical frivolity dissolving into a granite-hard nub of sadness. A gem of a piece by Bucket Club, a company taking its own very solid place in the world.