Sitting Bear And The Man In The Moon’s Reflection The Basement, Brighton, Nov 26 (From The Argus)

Sitting Bear And The Man In The Moon’s Reflection The Basement, Brighton, Nov 26

2:44pm Friday 27th November 2009 in Stage Reviews By Rosie Clarke

This production, a work in progress from Inconvenient Spoof, certainly doesn’t suffer from a lack of ideas.

In fact, the inventiveness on display in this small-scale production was overwhelming, as the experimental company flung props, garbled ideas and gabbling characters into a confusing mish-mash of a show.

The scenery changed ingeniously: while puppets debated across a miniature hand-knitted stage, a Sims-style landscape was projected on to a wall as a backdrop, taking the characters in their hot air balloon from a pastoral landscape across the ocean via a Japanese temple.

New characters were introduced very fast – particularly in the case of the replicating army of Muppet-like frogs – and the hooded, black-clad puppeteers manipulated them dextrously, providing a range of voices and accents.

There were moments of delicate beauty as the narrator dripped water into a bowl on a projector, sending bubbles and ripples washing across the Moon’s face.

The Man in the Moon was reminiscent of the Mighty Boosh Moon – but both bear and moon drifting into cod-Shakespearian language merely added to the confusion.

The episode on the sea, where the protagonists appeared to undergo therapy at the edge of the world from a half-man, half-fish, seemed pointless: the production then raced to the end before winding down with puppet sex as excrutiatingly embarrassing as that in Team America: World Police.

There’s a market for comic puppetry for adults, and this was a worthwhile experiment, but a gentler pace might help the audience to comprehend the story and care about the characters.