The Toyland Murders

This production from Nottingham's Kite Tail Theatre Company purports to be a piece of 'puppet noir', yet lacks any real resemblance to the stylised crime sagas popular in America during the forties and fifties. It shows so little affection for the genre and its conventions that it's best thought of as a parody of a parody. It's Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid rewritten by dilettantes, a joyless trawl through second-hand tropes and Police Squad! jokes.

With a series of murders occurring throughout the metropolis of Toyland, it's up to rag doll inspector Carmen McGraw and teddy bear deputy Harvey B. Feltz to uncover the identity of the killer. Their investigation leads them through an underworld populated by characters rendered interchangeable by the casts's gratingly loud delivery.

It would be unreasonable to expect the plot of a family friendly puppet parody to be of much interest in itself, but as the production's humour falls flat, the audience looks elsewhere for stimulation. There's none to be found in the episodic narrative structure here, and so we turn to the puppetry. Competent but uninteresting, their designs aren't particularly appealing, and each is given very little to do. Suspended in mid air, there's no sense of the characters interacting with each other or their surroundings. Had more thought gone in to establishing Toyland as a vivid setting with a sense of atmosphere and detail, then the show could have been saved at least in part.