THEATRE

A show based on a senile old man playing hide the cucumber, sounds far more entertaining than the actual product, but innuendo aside, sadly this puppet show (supposedly for adults) was dull sentimental bore. Performed by Rumen Gavanozov of Theatre Atelie 313, the puppet is beautifully crafted as an elderly philosophical figure with a tendency to become distracted by his missing cucumbers and a touch Narcoleptic; which was extensively dragged out. The snoring gag is never funny, even when a puppet does it and perhaps less so. It tried so hard to be funny, but it was painfully drab.

Both puppet and puppeteer were cute though, and the Bulgarian puppeteer was naturally charming but with very weak material. For a one-man operated puppet, i suppose it was operated with reasponable skill, but he grappled with illusionism with no precision to the eye line, no attempt to make the puppet breath, and no fixed point or sense of gravity (the three basic principals in puppeteering). The unfocused stance of the puppet was even more important to the piece, as the crux of the show sent the puppet flying, but there was no contrast, and perhaps the puppets engineering was overambitious for a one-man show.

The cleverest aspect of the show however, was his no-handed puppetry; where he subtly nudged the table to make the puppets head bob to create the impression of speech, but sadly, this was its only redeeming feature. Thematically centred on old age and decay, unfortunately the show seems to extend this to an impression of a disappointing digression of the artform, but in reality this is not the case, as this show isn’t a patch on some of the other puppetry shows at the fringe.