Showing @ Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, Tue 31 Jan only

What makes puppetry valuable? Perhaps it’s the way we can delve further into the darkest boundaries of our existence as puppets can reflect our passions and desires with a certain level of autonomy. Maybe it’s just the design and technical specifications which make them hover somewhere between prop and character. With Invisible Thread’s Plucked however, there is an exploration of the surreal which just doesn’t quite work.

The piece straddles both the mythic and the real, the first half mapping out the troubling relationship of two near-life sized puppets whose children, bizarrely made up of household toys and objects, have a tendency to run away. Abandoned and forlorn, the mother takes to the forest, inhabited by strange creatures who find themselves imprisoned in her dungeon – not a euphemism, just a strange second half of the show.

There’s a sense that there is more at work in this show than might first appear. The gentle, music box soundtrack which intervenes throughout the first half seems to complement quite an idyllic lifestyle the couple have set up for themselves. Searching for that white picket fence homeliness, the disruption comes from nowhere, unexplained and uninvited. It’s stepped up in the second half, as for each of the creatures locked in the dungeon the mother seems to slowly morph into a raven – a metaphor for freedom, flight or independence? It’s hard to say. Dark, sketchy animation which is painted onto a screen via a live video feed accompanies an irksome feeling to the whole play – but drifts into the unknown more than the surreal, clutching at meaning and narrative but seeming to miss. Creator Liz Walker is known for exploring the macabre humour at the root of our lives; this production drags us into a blackened world, exposing faint beauty and hidden poetry, however, it’s just too difficult to pluck that overall meaning which seems to elude its audience.