Perth Theatre Company and Weeping Spoon productions (Tim Watts, Arielle Gray and Chris Isaacs) burst onto the British theatre scene in 2011 on the tiny back of touchingly powerful animation/puppetry one-man dystopia story Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer, which deservedly went on to tour globally. Their follow-up show, It’s Dark Outside, comes freighted with expectation and it’s great to see the company taking their form in a new direction, whilst holding on to some of those qualities – emotional directness, quality puppetry and expressive visual metaphor – that made their first production so original and powerful.

In many ways, this is a much more puppetry oriented show: its dance of objects and characters enacts the fragmentation and confusion of a mind deteriorating with age. The story focuses on one old man, discovered fidgeting heavily in his living room, which isn’t behaving entirely as it should. A distant Western movie plays in the background as fluffy clouds of memory escape his head. This forms a wonderfully effective puppetry metaphor and, from something of a slow start, we are soon catapulted into an affecting quest story as, armed with a butterfly net, a tent and a ‘Wanted’ poster, he tries to snare them back.

The video design allows us to move effortlessly between the real and fantastical, and imagery and association powerfully build as the story grows. Accompanied by his trusty steed (in a wonderful absurd bit of puppetry I don’t want to ‘spoil’ too much here), our hero hunts through the fleeting memories and experiences of his life which themselves prove to be as insubstantial as little fluffy clouds. Puppets of different scales and forms animate the various versions of himself and his family and are always expertly and compellingly handled: absurd imagery and an affecting score amplify the resonance of the quest.