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.

Almost without being noticed, an unassuming elderly man crosses the stage and starts addressing us in a thickly evocative Spanish accent. Carles Cañellas tells us that Small Suicides was made in 1984, that he saw it performed by its Hungarian creator, Gulya Molnàr, several times, and that Molnàr gave him permission to take it on. While he’s talking, he removes his jacket and shoes carefully and deliberately and puts on another pair of shoes and another jacket. It’s considered, precise, the objects telling the story with him: Cañellas literally steps into Molnàr’s shoes. It’s a lovely way of framing this charming and eccentric piece of performance-philosophy, priming us for a show concerned with mutable identities and what it means to take on a life.

In Cañellas’s hands, everyday consumables are animated in such a way that they express something essential about themselves. Less puppeteer and more enabler, Cañellas gives voice to the objects with chirrups and mutters, his mobile features child-like with mischief and delight as their stories play out. A match falls in love with a coffee bean. An Alka-Seltzer tries to pass itself off as confectionery. In each case, the very use which defines the item is the inevitable means of its self-destruction: the match is lit, the Alka-Seltzer dissolved. It’s ingenious and absorbing.

The show isn’t best served by its presentation in the Tobacco Factory theatre, where its physical smallness, upon the full appreciation of which a lot of the subtlety of its ideas depends, is problematic rather than eloquent. The majority of the performance takes place on a table top, illuminated by a single bulb shaded with a brown paper bag, and from the sixth row I was squinting. But it’s not just what you can see: what you can hear – the crunch of peanut shells, the rip of the struck match, rustle of sweet wrappers, fizz of water, the sounds of real things happening in the lives and deaths of the animated consumables – is essential, and at times was lost.

The show did stay with me in a surprising and sweet way, however. When I got home and set about preparing a snack, I was peculiarly conscious of things that I’d ordinarily take for granted, like the way a teabag reacts to being doused in boiling water as if it’s been scalded, or the way blueberries in a bowl jiggle when they’re being rinsed under a running tap in a way that only blueberries do. Everyday objects seemed animate with the very uniqueness of their own life forces. Small Suicides had shifted in a tiny way how I experienced the world, and for that I was grateful.

Dik Downey and Adam Blake look pretty much how we expect clowns to look, with over-sized trousers, too-big boots, red noses, and hair as if they’ve just stuck their fingers in a plug socket. And to begin with, they behave pretty much as we expect clowns to behave: all silly walks, happy-sad faces, and roping the audience in to playing squeaky-toy orchestra.

But then it starts to get weird. Not creepy-weird but meta-theatrical-weird. When Adam shines a torch into his face and adopts an evil grin, Dik accuses him of having crossed the line and strayed into scary-clown territory. Dik and Adam, we soon realise, don’t really know what they’re doing, and heading through the doorframe to ‘backstage’ (we can still see them, although Dik insists we can’t) to consult the script is only intermittently helpful. Not only this, but their very existence is subject to the whim of their foul-mouthed and sadistic boss, Poco, the archetypal ‘scary clown’, who exerts a puppet-master’s control over the pair, sending them into a hilarious, dark and dirty dance routine whenever they undermine his authority. Unsurprisingly, they want out.

Throughout, the show gleefully subverts our expectations of clowns and puppets and plays fast and loose with the boundaries of its theatrical world. There’s palpable relish in seeing what it’s possible to get away with, how far they’ll go and how far we’ll go with them. Pretty far, it turns out. We’re easily roped in to service their games and plots, whether that’s being romanced by a love-struck Adam or, in the case of the man sitting in the row in front of me, having shoes and socks forcibly removed by Dik so that he can demonstrate sock puppets. It’s joyfully anarchic.

At the heart of the show are two hugely generous and skilful performances, full of wit and vulnerability.  Dik’s clown is at once naive and indignant, Adam’s by turns wistful and sardonic. They’re an endlessly watchable double act, manifesting all the unhealthily intense affection and antagonism of a codependent relationship.

Coulrophobics (those who fear clowns, of course) have nothing to fear: the pair’s subjugation by Poco is intriguing and bizarre rather than genuinely menacing, though a little more threat here might help propel the piece forward: their desperation to escape only really becomes apparent as a driver in the latter third of the show, when their failure to outwit Poco results in the ultimate humiliation (there is a warning in advance that the show contains full frontal nudity).

It’s sublimely entertaining and thoroughly deserved the extended applause it received from its full house, setting the bar high at the start of Bristol Puppetry Festival – a programme that asks us to expect the unexpected and consistently challenges what visual theatre is.