Blind Summit’s successful Edinburgh transfer, The Table, is a triptych of absurd, funny and technically accomplished pieces exploring the possibilities of puppetry and performance. The company have, in the past, collaborated with the ENO, Complicité and other big names but here the puppet takes the foreground as both the subject and form of the group’s more intimate show.
The first episode sees a Japanese Bunraku puppet, operated by three people, explaining the basics of puppetry by illustrating hilariously what happens when the puppeteers go wrong. The puppet establishes a playful rapport with his audience before announcing he is to re-enact the final twelve hours of Moses’ life ‘in real time’, entering into Beckett-style monologue. This is accompanied by excellently choreographed movement, puppetry reference, and the appearance of a silent woman.
Those who grow tired of a puppet’s existential crisis (Krapp’s Last Table?) will enjoy the other two pieces more, which have no speech but seem less self-serious. These are a short interlude in which disembodied heads and hands move between empty frames creating interesting visual illusions, followed by the pièce de résistance, a crime thriller told across the table using only pieces of paper covered with text and images.
The table, incidentally, is of the white folding variety, in keeping with the show’s minimalist, ‘flat pack’ aesthetic; Moses has a cardboard head and cloth body, and the final piece is comprised of only one black suitcase and a veritable rainforest of A4 paper. This stripped-back feel would be bleak were it not for the warmth and wit of Blind Summit, who succeed in creating not just a ‘serious puppet production on top of a table’ but a childlike experience for adults that combines images with movement and physical comedy with verbal nuance.
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