Three men, one puppet and a table. The curtain lifts on nothing more than this. Yet within seconds the audience are drawn into a world of the imagination, a shared adventure of the mind. The three puppeteers expertly capture every nuance of body language, bringing Moses the puppet to spellbinding life. While they remain mute throughout the performance Moses does all the talking. He explains to the assembled theatregoers that they are in for a night of ‘extreme puppetry’. He also promises his interpretation of the last 12 hours in the life of Moses, there on the table. The bare table. Only this table is to become a garden, a gym, and a prison, anything that can be suggested by a puppet’s mime.
How can a critic describe this amazing, unique and captivating show? Waiting For Godot meets Muffin the Mule? The Sixth Sense by way of Inigo Pipkin? The empty table is reminiscent of Beckett’s minimalist stage. The way in which the fourth actor is a woman never able to see Moses, certainly reminds us of Bruce Willis’s unwittingly dead psychiatrist.
The puppet’s antics start off funny enough, leering at a girl in the front row and asking her if she was ‘in’ to puppets (wink, wink). Indeed, the Lakeside audience laughed their collective heads off at Moses’ every jape. But he becomes increasingly surreal, bleak and sad. We never find out what fate has brought him to the table, and maybe that’s not important. While short on narrative structure, The Table never fails to be breathtaking, thanks to the sheer inventiveness of its puppetry.
Two more acts follow. Second up is psychedelic ballet by disembodied heads, magically leaping between picture frames. How do they do that, you might wonder, and you’ll go home still trying to figure it out. Last is a story of a fugitive on the run, destined for a sticky end, all told on sheets of A4 taken in sequence from a suitcase. Again the emphasis is on laugh out loud humour and the sheer artistry of it all. True, a small number of the pictures were hard to make out from the back row. However, the breakneck pace of the performers made sure no one lost the plot.
For those who like their marionettes to be avant-garde, weird and definitely for grown ups, this show will be an outstanding treat.
The Table played on January 31 and February 1 2012 31st and Feb 1st 2012 at the Lakeside Arts Centre
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