The Table

If you were to boil down Samuel Beckett's works, reducing them to their existential, aching essence, you might come up with The Table: a show in which a puppet waits for nothing on a small table for 40 years. It is Beckett to the nth degree.

Blind Summit Theatre's new show is fronted by the puppet. Given a gravelly voice by one of the three men controlling him, he nimbly gives us a tour of his tabletop home.

His plan to show us "epic puppetry", a one-puppet dramatisation of the last 12 hours of Moses' life, is interrupted when a woman comes and sits at the table. She is silent and unaware of him throughout. This first interaction for 40 years caves in his puppet soul.

Technically, the show is brilliant. The puppet moves with such human liquidity that every step and minuscule movement emotes. Yet this main sequence feels rather drawn out and thin. It ends up being technically impressive but hollow – a bit like the puppet itself.

The rest of the hour is filled with visual tricks and old-fashioned special effects. A series of frames appear, with floating heads moving between them like a spooky fruit machine. The story of a fugitive is storyboarded in front of the audience. Again, all very impressive, but ephemeral. There is a nagging feeling that if all the skill on show could be applied to something greater than a series of sketches, magic will happen.

The lingering feeling is less Beckett, and more Pirandello – this is a group of puppeteers in search of a big idea.