Blind Summit are back at the Pleasance with their witty puppet Moses, floating heads and ‘French Marionettism.’ And yes, they do deliver. In the first twenty minutes of the show, the main puppet endeavours to perform ‘the last twelve hours of Moses’s life on top of a table’, but he gets lost in questioning the act of pupettering, and deconstructs the performance itself. His wonderfully angular face, carved from cardboard, tells a thousand words as he works out the dimensions of his table and later moon walks across it until he falls off. The puppeteering of Moses was seamless - his movements were incredibly precise, conveying a full range of emotions. This was particularly evident in the puppet’s breakdown into hysterical laughter, a moment I still cherish.I laughed at first when the action moved onto a dance of white ‘disembodied heads’ spinning around in front of a black curtain. However, as the section unfolded I began to feel a little nauseous at the speed of the movements. The montage of floating heads zooming in and out of three picture frames did not form a very clear story. This scene did not develop to its full potential as the section became very samey after a while. Blind Summit are know for their ‘ground breaking’ puppetry but I wouldn’t have called this particular scene ground-breaking. The length of the section needed to be halved, but it was intriguing nonetheless. The company topped the night off with their ‘French Puppetry’- cartoons hand-drawn onto A4 sheets of paper, being dramatically pulled out of a black leather suitcase by the performers. The puppeteers held a cigarette in their mouth whilst performing - it’s French. I absolutely adored how clever this final scene was. It was a simplistic act of genius in their ability to tell a complex story through such basic means.
