Review: The Devil and Mr Punch, Barbican Centre

A Punch so strong it might well have been spiked, Julian Crouch’s meta-puppet show is the best Improbable piece I’ve seen to date. For anyone, like me, born too late to catch Shockheaded Peter it’s unmissable, for it works the same alchemy to restore theatre’s discarded junk into gleaming vintage.

Not that The Devil and Mr Punch is nostalgia fest. Yes, Crouch’s gorgeous glove puppets have the same evocative resonance as an old-fashioned sweet shop, but Crouch has here pinned Punch to the psychologist’s chaise-longue for a sharp, extensive and probing interrogation. This is Mr Punch played with Red Button extras, including player-cam and director’s commentary.

Its core is an extended version of the classic Punch sequence: baby goes out the window, wife gets thwacked to death before the various social custodians out to apprehend our crescent-faced villain follow suit. Thus, Punch weaves his way towards the gallows and, beyond, into a puppet hell lined with disused doll corpses and populated by inquisitive dinosaur phalluses - or phallic dinosaurs. (Either way, they're vile.) Even at this level, it’s barking mad – a mix of Terry Gilliam and Jean-Pierre Jeunet – and never spurns a chance to milk its gags dry.

But, characteristic of Improbable, The Devil and Mr Punch walks a drunken zigzag path, veering into tangential side roads. Alongside a miniature variety show, including a piglet formation team, a pair of singing butchers, a dancing skeleton and two knights destined to duel forever, Crouch zooms out to show the controlling hands of Punch’s Professors, Mssrs Harvey and Hovey (Nick Haverson and Rob Thirtle), who are forever popping out of panels like figurines on a Swiss clock. With their formal wear and whiteface, Harvey and Hovey resemble the Godot boys biding their time with roadside puppetry. Who, Crouch asks, is pulling whose strings?

Such haphazardly meandering structures can be offputting, but here the cast cock us knowing looks that say, ‘Stick with us.’ The reward is philosophy – of art, of human nature, of time – pulled loosely together, still leaving room for further work on our part, but illuminating its subject from all angles. What becomes of the unfashionable artist? Why is violence so entertaining? How does Punch exist in each of us?

Haverson, in particular, gives a virtuosic performance, clownishly contorting himself and blooming into the squeaking, squawking voices of his characters. He shows us the madness, the sadness and the solitude of the puppeteer, all perfectly punctuated with mock hamminess. Come the end, he sheds a single tear and seems as lifeless as a glove puppet without a guiding hand.Photographs courtesy of Improbable Theatre