The creative forces of Neil Bartlett, a highly respected director, and South Africa's Handspring Puppet Company, highly praised for revealing human and animal essence through their manufactured characters, have combined to produce an evening of mind-numbing, po-faced, self-indulgence.
This is a play of themes rather than plot. Bartlett is interested in the passage of time; how lives are preserved, distorted and lost in the memory, and how we cope with imminent death.
The challenge was to address all this in a play (which Bartlett also directs) populated by puppeteers and mute puppets. These are not yer Sooty and Sweep mittens, but highly complex creations of the kind that Handspring created for the huge National Theatre hit War Horse.
However, alarm bells should have rung with the idea that not only would the seemingly uneventful lives of Handspring's co-founders Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones serve as the inspiration for this play, but that they would share the stage as the lead puppeteers controlling younger and older versions of themselves.
Out of this material Bartlett's fictional story looks back to the beginning and forward to the end of a gay relationship which begins in 1971 and ends with death in 2036. These future scenes are accompanied by a lecture on the fragile condition of an octogenarian's mind. What little tension there is, is derived from whether a dying old man can be persuaded by his equally elderly partner to sign his will.
As we would expect from Handspring, the puppets are beautifully carved and sinewy humans, with faces chiselled from blocks of wood. But they are made to move by a black-suited, barefooted team of puppeteers who distractingly scurry around the promenade stage, earnestly performing Bartlett's meandering and mostly humourless dialogue. One of them provides the interminable barks of the old couple's dog.
Top and tailed with Ovid's moving story of Philemon and Baucis the lovers who, like Bartlett's protagonists, spend their whole lives together, the play should be unbearably poignant. Instead, the evening is merely unbearable.