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By Renee Gerlich, NZ Festival 2014

How do you dance to puppetry? That's the question I brought, along with my silliest friend, to Suitcase Royale's Ballad of Backbone Joe. The catalogue blurb was dizzying: theatre, storytelling, puppets, and bring your best dancing shoes. What?

That's not all: “We've got CDs for sale out the front,” plugs one of the performers from behind his giant cello. He reminds me of someone, maybe it's Peter Sellers.

“I've got one by Coldplay for $7 or the highest bid,” says the drummer. Always the clown, the drummer. When this three-piece starts playing along to the guitarist's twanging country vocals, it's the drummer you watch. He is ecstatic. He moves like a cat rubbing itself on a pantsleg, then as if he's stumbling to catch kitchen utensils falling out of a box. It's like he hasn't been out of his straitjacket for 5 weeks, and he even fell out his chair – but never missed a beat.

Oh the cock-ups were aplenty. They were the best. The forgotten props, the tangents that get the actors out of time with their soundtrack.  It's all part of it, and though this show is an NZ Festival one, it is also everything I love about the Fringe. “Stage hands are expensive,” says one of the actors, arranging the stage between acts. “That's why I do this myself, under cover of darkness.”

And there is plenty of stage to hand. The set is an eerie street in outback Australia circa 1978, lit when the telephone box is occupied. Alternately it is the inside of the street's dodgy hotel or the abbatoir where Backbone Joe trains as a boxer.  There is a cemetery – or rather, a steel box of pebbles with a shovel next to it – inhabited by Whitehorn the slack-jawed skeleton. A suitcase is folded open to become a car windscreen with bonnet and headlights. Sometimes actors become silhouettes behind the projector screen, on which a moving strip of transparencies pans through the street. Then the screen rolls up, and Backbone Joe is standing on a bridge with Detective von Trapp, piecing together the mystery in which Joe is enfolded.

“But why would Dan make me take cherry flavoured horse tranquilisers?”

“Because they ran out of orange.”

The drums, guitar and cello remain onstage for plucky, lanky country interludes or some sly and stealthy jazz. Holy smokes this show is more fun than you can pack into a suitcase that doubles as a car bonnet.

Suitcase Royale are from Australia, but they can find kindred spirits in Wellington with Trick of the Light theatre, who performed during the Fringe. Bookbinder showed in the Arty Bees books stackroom, and not only did the production team of two also not have stage hands, their entire cast consisted of a guy with a big beard named Ralph.

Ralph too is a multitasker. He maneuvred two-dimensional puppets under a lampshade to make silhouettes. He had a beautiful handmade storybook and figurines, a gramophone with one of those big petalled horns; he had a deep bass baritone for his bookbinder, a peeping voice for his apprentice. Ralph does not perform slapstick or jazz, but he does manage to fold into his story all the metafictional layers of Lloyd Jones' Mister Pip. When the bookbinder's apprentice falls into a book he is binding, the stacks of books on his desk suddenly upturn to the looming buildings of a de Chirico-esque city. The bookbinder had warned us all that the best binders are illiterate.

That warning came right in the opening, when the two characters first meet. “You're not the first apprentice to come by here,” the bookbinder said from his desk, facing us, the audience. So we are the apprentice in that opening scene, and as a seasoned veteran, the bookbinder is not sure whether we will have the necessary skills and qualities to take on the craft. But by the end, after a particularly challenging job, the bookbinder generously concludes:

“Perhaps I have misjudged you. You have given it new life.”

It's even more generous and ending that the one Suitcase Royale offered as soon as the clapping started: “Give yourselves a round of applause!” As for dancing to puppetry, I still don't know how that goes. The show I saw was seated, and they're mixing it up for the standing weekend performances: anyway I'm sure they will rig something up, and it will be a total hoot.