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.