The Great Puppet Horn

Forget the year of the dragon, 2012 is fast turning into the year of the puppet at the Fringe. Shows including Grit, The Fantasist and The Trench have put puppets centre-stage, to critical acclaim. But can puppets pull off topical satire? Yes, they can, if The Great Puppet Horn is anything to go by.

Written and performed by Jeremy Bidgood and Lewis Young, of Pangolin’s Teatime Company, The Great Puppet Horn ("the Horn is ambiguous") is an avowedly leftfield current affairs sketch show performed behind a white screen. Using puppets and this critic’s first glimpse of an overhead projector since maths class in secondary school, the pair introduce a cast of characters—from David Cameron and his sidekick Nick Clegg (literally a lapdog) to Grammar Cop (typography’s answer to Robocop—arranged into the least linear of narratives.

The stand out character is Billy the Bipolar Bear (his tagline: "mentally unstable and covered in hair"). As the icecaps melt, Billy is forced to immigrate to Britain, leading to anti-North Polish rioting in his new home. Meanwhile, in another climate change related sub-plot, Sean Connery, now the leader of independent Scotland, turns off England’s water supply.

Most of the impressions are hilariously off-key (save Prince Charles) and some of the gags are under-written, but The Great Puppet Horn is delivered with enough guile and gusto to make up for any shortcomings in the script. The puppetry is imaginative and a host of creative props give the hour a pleasingly anarchic feel. The puppets, it seems, are here to stay.