Anyone who has spent any time in a theatre over the past 10 years will know that puppetry is no longer just for kids. In the forefront of this revolution has been Green Ginger, whose mixing of latex with wild imagination has produced cult classics such as Bambi: The Wilderness Years, a piece that has nothing to do with Disney and wide-eyed fawns and everything to do with survival in the cruel urban jungle. Similarly, Green Ginger's Frank Einstein owes very little to Mary Shelley, although in this case it is not always to its advantage.
In Frank Einstein, the scribblings of the lonely and sex-mad Shelley Evans, who has the hots for Frank, the door-to-door window salesman, take on a life of their own. Her overwrought prose - "the wind howled like the voices of a thousand wild orphans" - and a fatal typing error set in motion a train of events that lead us to the creepy Castle Einstein.
Here in the crumbling dungeons, the very, very clever but nasty Dr Einstein and his very, very stupid but lovable assistant Igor, are attempting to discover the secret of life with the help of the castle's rat population. Frank's arrival coincides with the Doctor's evil plan to experiment on a larger scale.
The show has plenty of off-the-wall humour of the smile-to-yourself rather than the laugh-out-loud variety, and its leaps of the imagination are wacky and fun as the put-upon Igor gets his revenge on his employer via some of the cheesiest hits of the 1950s.
There are also odd moments of divine inspiration: the creepy twinkling graveyard; the Heath Robinson-style machines in Dr Einstein's lab. But the scenario and script are too thin to be really satisfying and, although the puppets are excellent, the limitations and seams of this two-puppeteer piece show all too clearly.
Most of all, the show never quite pitches itself right, so it ends up feeling as though it is not really complex or sophisticated enough for adults and not quite right for children - unless of course they happen to be experts on the gothic.
· Until Saturday. Box office: 0870 050 0511.
