MARK FISHER finds The Puppet Lab resurrecting the concept of puppet theatre for grown-ups

WHY DOES puppetry for adults sound like such an anomaly? There isn’t any other artform that we reserve exclusively for children, so why puppets? When there are so many long and honourable adult traditions in other countries, it's actually an anomaly that we don't do more of it here.

That's especially the case when you’re reminded of the imaginative possibilities that object-based theatre opens up. Children's theatre in general is more on the ball in this respect, having an instinctive sense of play, make-believe and transformation that grown-up theatre often loses sight of.

If the story demands that you fly into a surreal dreamworld somewhere between the delirium of Chagal and the pain of Picasso, then in puppet theatre that's exactly what you can do.

Thus it is, in the Puppet Lab's beguiling stairwell drama, that young Stacey steps out of her mundane life of neglect and into a surreal landscape of oceans and monsters. Just as suddenly, she's back in her Edinburgh tenement observing the lives of her neighbours: the Polish refugee with his grandfather clocks, the elderly fan of romantic fiction, the sweet-natured artist, the near down-and-out with his forbidden dog and the musician-cum-Lothario.

As it happens, if there's a criticism of Symon Macintyre's show, written by John Harvey with additional directing assistance from Dundee Rep's Dominic Hill, it's that it could take bolder imaginative leaps – more of the kind of mind-bending shifts in perspective we get at the tragic end of the hour-long tale when the stairs are upturned as if we too are spinning to the ground floor.

That, however, is not to underestimate a consummately executed show, performed unseen by Macintyre and Kim Bergsagel to a superb soundtrack recorded by Barney Strachan with music by Mike James.

With slow, understated movements on a set that opens like a giant doll's house, they evoke the atmosphere of tenement living, the noise, the isolation, the intimacy and the anonymity, all filtered through the desolate figure of a girl on the stairwell.

It's a show that would appeal to older children as well as adults – it's only the bad language and downbeat ending that sets it apart – but it’s a rare treat for the grown-ups to see something of a creative standard the kids take for granted.

EH6 can be seen at the Clifton Theatre, Nairn, on 19 March.

© Mark Fisher, 2006