Dutch artist Duda Paiva has been creating work that combines his training as a contemporary dancer with puppetry and objects for the past eight years. Bastard! is the company’s international award winning eighth show and is a contemporary visual theatre solo presenting a series of encounters in a giant rubbish tip between a besuited artist (played by Paiva) and the more monstrous parts of himself.

There is a strongly synthetic flavour to the mise en scene – colours in lurid yellows and ambers from the full-height projections that flank two sides of the stage, picking out the brightly coloured plastics that make up much of the vast rubbish tip set. In this plastic world it’s the human, not the rubbery puppets, that seems out of place and the scene is set for some existential anxiety. A thematic sense of mounting chaos permeates the work, from the pleasurably uneven, off-balance bed frame that forms our primary puppet stage to the disordered interruptions in the action which seem to take place inside Paiva’s mind at intervals when he disappears into the tip.

The puppets and puppetry are masterful – nearly man-sized foam creatures with a vibrant spring of life in their long limbs, hooked by Paiva into effortlessly lifelike contortions. In a Beckettian twist the initially comic scenario is peopled by two old crones: the saggy-dugged Clementine (whose diminutive, Cle or ‘clay’ also proposes a Beckettian style of symbolism as a sort of earthy everywoman) and her ‘love’, the desperate ape-like Bastard whose long limbed and childlike cries for help reach out to us. The human scale of these characters and the unignorable demands they put on Pavia’s character – emotional, physical even sexual – empowers them as metaphors to convey wider themes about humanity, kindness and need.

The tale is a dark one and perhaps doesn’t quite maintain a sense of its own limits – there’s one particularly shocking moment that for me isn’t earned and nearly makes me lose faith in the piece. But its heartfelt cries, at times literal, are convincing. This is art that’s deeply felt and it’s hard not to be swept along by its sincerity in attacking big questions. Bastard! is an adaptation of a short story by Boris Vian, which I have not read, but in its profoundly physical and puppet-esque investigation of how we treat our elders, of the value of art and the ways that what we need is often hidden inside ourselves, Paiva has made the story all his own.