There is one real star in this maiden production from Handspring UK, the British sister company to South African puppetry gurus Handspring, and his name is Ted Hughes.
'Crow' is based loosely on the late poet laureate's 1970 collection of the same name. And whenever one of the ensemble of puppeteer-dancers stops to declaim the flinty, unsettling words of his bleak delve into creation myths and human rapacity – for which the bird of the title is central protagonist and metaphor – the effect is electrifying.
Everything else here is rather iffy. When it comes to the puppets, you'd expect the (deep breath) namesake spin-off of the company who gave us 'War Horse' to convince. There's nothing in the league of Joey and chums here, although the inquisitive, hopping menace of the life-sized crow puppets is impressively sinister. But a nightmarish humanoid crow figure that appears in the second half is symptomatic of a production that takes the bleakness of Hughes's poetry as a starting point and goes a bit mad with it.
Hughes was fascinated by the sinister qualities of the natural world: hamming everything up into some denatured gothic wet dream misses the point and the subtlety. Also, it involves some interpretive dancing, which I don't ever want to talk or think about again.
The best of the puppetry, coupled with a haunting ambient score from Leafcutter John, ensures there is a little more to this show than Hughes. The wordless passages do chafe, but the poetry really is extraordinary.