If you do go along to see this show during the fringe, be sure to get there early and grab a front row seat. On my visit, the show virtually sold out and I found myself sat on the back row with a distinctly obscured view; and this with only three rows of seats in front of me. Also, be prepared to calibrate your expectations in accordance with the £5 ticket price. On my first day at the Fringe I was lucky enough to witness two finely crafted performances, clearly created through many hours of dedicated attention by highly skilled artists. This show reminded me that the Edinburgh Fringe is an open access festival featuring performers and shows at various stages of development.

The Black Hoods Cabaret features two performers in black hoods manipulating various puppets through several sketches, which are sometimes loosely connected. It has an anarchic feel, and features crudely constructed puppets fashioned from cardboard and foam. They have youth and apparent enthusiasm on their side, but the gulf in quality between this and the pieces I saw the day before was very wide indeed. This has nothing to do with budget and everything with attention to detail and dedication to their craft. Knuckle and Joint seem to have gone for the idea of a crazy, chaotic, haphazard cabaret, but the danger with playing the part of being inept is that you’d better do it very well.

The dance at the beginning did not fill me with confidence, being neither particularly well done, nor funny. There follows a scene featuring a ‘fat’ lady singing badly whilst balanced within a hoop. She has some kind of difficulties and reappears as a Pac-Man head chasing a giant cookie. This sad character reappears throughout the show, in different guises, speaking in the same screechy mumbling voice. A second recurring character is a bunraku figure whose construction and manipulation is more engaging, yet still falling short of a professional level. He appears to burgle an object from a museum, and then has an engaging chase sequence and a karate fight with unseen opponents. There is a compère character who tells some very unsophisticated jokes, and a giant drug addict athlete (a giant version of the burglar perhaps?) who quite awkwardly attempts to engage the audience in vocal participation, and a large dog figure that is quite appealing.

In general, I imagine this show could have been thrown together in a few days, and doesn’t function as a positive advert for the company’s abilities. I should think they would be well served by focusing on the construction and manipulation of the puppets, to create the illusion of independent life and not even necessarily try to be that funny. Most of the scenes show the beginnings of promising ideas, but they are just too slow and indulgent, and require a lot more work on the time-consuming aspects of the craft of puppetry and/or comedy. Again, this review should be read in the knowledge that the reviewer had a very poor line of sight, and it is true that the show did arouse some chuckling from some in the audience – and it may improve throughout the run.