When Jack Pratchard is killed in his village, he has to travel across the ocean to the City of the Dead where the first person who ever died rules as Queen. She is searching for her husband in every dead soul that enters her grand palace. Meanwhile, on the shores of the living, a curious old man claims to have a secret under his hat. A great theatrical spectacle is underway, and jack Pratchard arrives there just in time to discover why the sea has been filling up with dead souls.

Storey’s narration is imbued with a surrealist sense of humour and delivered with heavy tone of voice; it’s clear that he enjoys his characters while still being able to keep a degree of narrative distance. He weaves in a number of literary references that bring an archaic quality to the construction of the tale, including a nod to the Greek myth of Charon, the boatman who guards the gates of the underworld and the space between the dead and the living; and Jack Pratchard’s reaction to his own death is reminiscent of Gogol’s satirical and fate-bound character Kovalylov in The Nose, both characters stand detached from and in awe of their predicaments.

The finely illustrated backdrops and characters give the piece a timeless, magical atmosphere. Moments of dramatic tension are marked by breaks from the stage frame. The living husband dances around the town square and out into the space of the theatre, laughing and giggling to conceal the secret behind his hat, guided by the narrator’s hands.

Dark magic and comedic allure aside, the narrative thread unravels in places. When images slide in and out of our field of vision, they do so with elegance but not always with intent. The beauty of the illustrations all too often fades into the wooden easel; they are at their most convincing when used outside the boundaries of the stage, not bogged down by technicalities or logistics.

Overall, Jack Pratchard is a brilliant feat of storytelling, with a timeless feel and an imaginative use of theatrical medium. Storey’s dedication to the story is impressive and the show falters only on the few occasions when it breaks with its own logic or over-confines itself to unnecessary boundaries.

The cast of three, warm but not saccharine, do a fantastically committed job of engaging their young audience (ages 3+). Mark Kane‘s Stick Man is a skinny, slightly geeky, but totally authoritative presence, with a nice line in extremely daft dancing. Playing most of the obstacles in Stick Man’s way, Emily Pollet tackles a welter of quick changes with clarity and vim, and still manages to invest the deserted Stick Lady with a soothing blend of sadness, stoicism and calm. The production also boasts a jaunty, catchy score by Benji Bower, which jogs sympathetically alongside Stick Man on his journey, with Brian Hargreaves (on percussion, saxophone, melodica and much else) pausing periodically to cheerfully channel the book’s narrative voice of warning (‘O Stick Man!’) through a handy megaphone.

Turning a thirty-page picture book into a fifty-minute show means taking things pretty slowly, and a couple of music-and-mime interludes do rather outstay their welcome. But director Sally Cookson makes good use of this enforced pacing, developing some real dramatic tension in the story’s closing stages, as a delightedly complicit audience (with fingers on lips) help prepare the way for Stick Man’s long-awaited family reunion.

If Stick Man lacks anything, it’s a sense of risk-taking and anarchy, of the peculiar, unpredictable liveness of theatrical storytelling. But it would be churlish to cavil at this highly-accomplished children’s show; a confident, charming, polished and thoroughly reliable seasonal entertainment for the very littlest theatre-goers.

Petrushka himself is a beautiful creation, gangling and mischievous, with a hint of haughty loneliness lurking behind his rouged nose and grimy joey frills. By some eerie brilliance, his clownish dance is composed of inch-perfect muscular tensions and extensions. The physical reality of this haunted, hopeless creature; the trembling leg that supports an impossible aerial arabesque; the satisfyingly weighted stamp of his gawky, gambolling love-dance, are all impeccably imagined and executed. His scarlet-frocked lady-love is commonplace by comparison, a provincial Venus with well-fleshed legs, vacantly complacent in her pirouetting. Even the moustachioed strong-man with his crowd-pleasing routine of muscle-flexing and sword-swallowing can’t compete with Petrushka’s wan intensity.

But if the puppets (designed by Lyndie Wright , manipulated by Ronnie Le Drew, Mandy Travis and Rebekah Wild) are amazing, the rest of the show isn’t without its problems. There’s far too much text, too much scene-setting, too much explanation and too many real bodies getting in the way of the puppets and their story.

Things do pick up pace in the second act, as the runaway Petrushka embarks upon a jaunt to Switzerland to ‘help’ a beleaguered Mr. Stravinsky with his efforts to write a new ballet. And here Josh Darcy, who’s far too genial to be remotely convincing as the wicked puppet-master, excels as Petrushka’s willing stooge. The unashamedly immature gags that litter this brief partnership are greeted with howls of ecstasy by the kids in the audience (who apparently prefer slapstick, silliness and the occasional blown raspberry to any amount of doomed love). But it’s doomed love they get, as we’re swept back to St. Petersburg where Petrushka plays out the final scenes of his doleful drama.

Petrushka is an ambitious conglomeration of jokes, dance, music, tragedy and magic tricks. Craftmanship and love are evident in every puppet, prop and gesture, and the show is indisputably strong on atmosphere, if – as a flurry of programme-consulting in the interval attested – less strong on clarity and focus. Will your five-year-old love it? I’m not making any promises. But I suspect that Petrushka’s uncanny dance will be staying with me for some time to come.

The narrative moves briskly, Juliet Larkin’s text and Ronnie Le Drew’s production relying upon our familiarity with the fable to keep exposition to a minimum. If I felt slightly deprived of a full mouse and broom pas de deux (a la Frederick Ashton’s Cinderella), this was more than made up for by a delicate divertissement of twirling cavaliers and their ladies, rodent clowns, tumblers and even (brilliantly) a troupe of mouse puppeteers.

This downplaying of Cinderella’s sentimental baggage is probably a smart option given the show’s target audience (ages 3+), who’re much more interested in knockabout comedy, and are mightily pleased by each opportunity to shout out, join in and try tiny footwear for size. They’re also enraptured by Lyndie Wright’s appealing sturdy puppet creations, while older spectators are more likely to be tickled by the sleight-of-hand necessary to allow a usually legless glove-puppet to try on that miniscule magic slipper.

Grown-ups are also more likely to appreciate the rather marvellous conceit of making Cinders (a clockmaker’s daughter, remember) responsible for deciding whether the palace clock ever will sound the fateful note of midnight. The lonely moment between the strokes of eleven and twelve, when our heroine has to decide between her father’s interests and her own, is a neat and very smart addition to the story. As is the smashing of that crucial shiny shoe, a development that requires Cinders’ prince to recognise his beloved solely on the evidence of his beady black eyes.

These subtleties are largely ignored by Cindermouse’s youthful target-audience who are, however, properly and vocally impressed by the friendly showmanship of puppeteers Roger Lade and Andrea Sadler. It’s hard not to be impressed by a show that handles a demanding crowd so deftly, charming kids and adults alike, without ever seeming to try too hard.

This is the second part of a 2-part interview with New York video blogger, Loren Feldman. If you missed the first part, you can watch it here. In this part we discuss Loren’s use of puppets and his ‘interventions’ in the tech world through this theatrical medium. For the most part, the puppet characters are parodies of existing figures in the US tech industry, including Robert Scoble, Shel Israel, Michael Arrington and Loic Lemeur. Intercut in this video are excerpts from Loren’s puppet video archive, these include:

• 1. Shel And Scoble Talk Chips
• 2. Shel Interviews Kevin Rose
• 3. Le Beast and Secretary Besson

Among the high-flying tech moguls of Silicon Valley Loren Feldman is something of an awkward rarity. He’s an agent-provocateur, a performer deft in the derrisory or to quote him in his own words, a “New York loud mouth kind of guy”. Trained film actor and self-made entrepreneur, the past few years have seen Feldman reinvent himself as one of the Web’s leading video bloggers (in English language) through his site 1938media. I caught up with him on a recent trip to London to discuss some of this digital delirium and to find out more about how Hollywood, Web technology and puppets work in unison.

Shun-kin is played by a Japanese cast in the original language, merging western dramatic conventions with Japanese theatre traditions. Let’s face it, it’s annoying to be asked to read surtitles during a performance, especially if the work is a visual piece by a British company. Is Complicité being pretentious here? My answer is no. Indeed, in the first half hour it’s difficult to keep up with reading and watching at the same time. The narrative isn’t simple and the surtitles are placed at the two sides of the stage, so one can only do one thing at a time: either read or watch the performance. But this mechanism builds up an alienating distance between the audience and the play, which makes what happens on stage mythical and otherworldly: it simply makes it more magic.

If you think about it, the story of Shun-kin and Sasuke is virtually untranslatable, like signatures and proper names. It is so closely connected to Japanese culture that it would become a completely different thing in translation. Among sliding doors and caged singing birds, shamisen and kimonos, this love story of sheer self-denial and blind self-affirmation happened in Japanese and it can only be told in the same language, with its rhythm, cadences and musicality.

A contemporary narrative frame (already in Tanizaki’s book, but perhaps not the most successful aspect of the show) and the use of Japanese Bunraku puppets implement the estrangement effect. As the story progresses, the blind protagonist slowly becomes a flesh-and-blood woman: first, as a young girl, she is embodied by a puppet controlled by no less than three women puppeteers, who are always oddly around when she attends her secret encounters with Sasuke, moving her limbs as though she were a living creature and giving her a strident, petulant voice. Then, as a young lady, she is played by a woman wearing a neutral mask, but still restrained by the puppeteers; lastly, the main puppeteer transforms herself into Shunkin. A journey towards a shameful desire makes Shunkin human – and condemns her to even more humiliating suffering.

There are moments of pure poetry in this show, such as when Shunkin (still a puppet) and Sasuke first have sex, when she gives birth to their first child, and when Sasuke blinds himself. Everything takes place on a dimly-lit stage, where a shady ambiguity mesmerises our imagination much more than clarity.

Is this wild orientalism? I see this as an attempt to explore difference from within, to embody it. But it would be interesting to hear what other people have to say about Shun-Kin.

Our compère for the evening is Baby Warhol: a deadpan, belligerent and unclothed baby dolly and self-proclaimed guru, floating inside a gilt frame. He’s supported by Chris Cresswel, gaunt, weird and creepy, demonstrating an unwholesome ability to terrorise the audience into collective interpretive dance.

Kate Brehm’s virtual toy theatre presents a hand-drawn episode from Alice in Wonderland, all the more magical because we can see exactly how she’s doing it. The Woman with No Mouth, Chloe Roach’s fabric-based animation, offers a daring and ever-so-slightly appalling exploration of an obsession with violent self-fashioning. And Robert Bidder’s Jumper Eggs (eggshells hand painted in the manner of significant items of knitwear) provides a beautiful, whimsical, offbeat interlude.

Florian, a cut-out animation from Andrew Gibbs and Zosienka, is a sepia-toned fairy tale about the fatal meeting of two lovers on a bridge, with a meticulous eye for environmental detail and infused by a strain of mordant wit. It’s like something a Pre-Raphaelite painter might have hit upon in a moment of unaccustomed giddiness – an absolute atmospheric delight.

Then Clementine the Living Fashion Doll (managed by Mark Mander) stars in her own battily glamorous addition to the Indiana Jones franchise. And Spank the Dancing Monkey (ably assisted by Iestyn Evans and Andy Heath) gives a moving, manic account of the vicissitudes of being a monkey minus an organ grinder.

If you haven’t been to the Little Angel, then get it sorted. Seriously. It’s one of the few theatres in London where I can’t remember ever being disappointed by a show. And Puppet Grinder Cabaret demonstrates why this might be so: a marvellous melange of fantastical stories, outrageous characters and unabashed eccentricity, imagined and orchestrated by some scarily talented folk. As Baby Warhol so rightly snarls: “This is art”. And I’m not going to argue with the guru.

“Once upon a time, there lived a sultan who was tormented in his dreams by visions of a little girl who was travelling through time. This is his story, incredible but true.

The sultan could no longer sleep, his growing anguish diverting his attention from affairs of state. In order to cure his sickness, and believing that he would find the girl in the land of dreams, he commissioned an unknown engineer living in 1900 to construct a time-travelling elephant. A few months later, the sultan set off with his court in search of the little giant, which, in the course of his nightmares, had been transformed into a marionette 5 metres high.

The trip was awful, but they found a series of clues as to her wherabouts. The giant loved sewing – she liked to stitch cars to the tarmac, boats to quaysides, trains to railway tracks and sometimes even envelopes to letterboxes.

The elephant followed the trail left by the puppeteers. And as in all love stories, strange things began to happen. Such was his happiness at getting closer to her, he began to expel hundreds of living birds which disappeared into the sky in a burst of joy.”