Tale of a Potato is another table-top show from Batisfera, following last year’s epic hit The Gummy Bears’ Great War. This time, they take that most ordinary of vegetables (the potato), use the most generic language, name their characters in the most generic way (protagonist, antagonist, unnamed) – yet still manage to create the wonder of a unique life.

Protagonist’s tale has all the elements you’d expect: birth, parents both caring and pushy, and the societal pressure urging it to save money and settle down. The potato falls in love, gets a job, goes on a quest, experiences jealousy in relationships and at work, and doesn’t always behave as we’d hope.

In short, this is a very ordinary potato with a very ordinary life. Although there are some spectacular exceptions, those elements jar slightly, as it’s the banality of the everyday that binds us to Protagonist and makes this show special. We recognise in the potato what we all have in common: we are each the hero and villain of our own tragicomedies.

So how do Batisfera make the tale of a humble potato so engaging? It’s in the skill of the puppeteer, Valentina Fadda. Strutting around the table, holstered with the knives she uses to carve out the vegetables, she creates character with an economy of movement. She infuses drama and personality into the storytelling, though an occasional lack of vocal clarity meant some lines were lost.

It is also in the cleverness of the set, with an apparently simple table deftly adjusted to create the different scenes. And it’s in the use of light: the small hand-held torch moved around to illuminate our potato protagonist from different positions, and multiple other clever light effects in miniature.

This is a beautifully-crafted show, that takes everything about the cycles of life and the realities we all face – and coalesces it into a tight 30 minutes and several vegetables.