Review: Ragnarok – a puppet show unlike anything I’ve ever seen

There are puppet shows, and then there’s Ragnarok.

Conjured up by Scottish theatre company Tortoise in a Nutshell, this immersive experience sees a living, breathing world built in miniature on the stage.

Inspired by the ancient Norse Ragnarok myth about the death of gods like Odin, Thor and Loki, and the destruction and rebirth of the world, the play is dark. Yet it’s also a fantastical and captivating journey into mystery.

Four performers and puppeteers (Emily Nicholl, Dylan Read, Shakara Rose Carter and Jim Harbourne) move in the darkness onstage, building and dismantling sets, and manipulating the little clay figures which populate them.

All the time, they use small, hand-held cameras to project images of this tiny world in human scale on the large video backdrop.

Like a live animation, these images show a dystopian alternate present, where the world is enduring an environmental catastrophe.

The actors build a town where law and order is breaking down, a service station where an end-of-days preacher and his cultists live, an endless uphill plain where our heroes trek, and the destruction wrought by the snake god – one of the actors in an elaborate mask, towering above the world.

All the while, a girl and her young brother go on a tragic quest through this land, and the visual comedy of the moment they find an abandoned playpark to play in is just perfect.

‘Unique and absorbing’ play

Designer Arran Howie and lighting designer Simon Wilkinson have worked visual wonders, while Jim Harbourne’s score for instruments and voice is live and atmospheric.

This unique and absorbing play was first thought of three years before Covid – and much like the world it shows, Ragnarok had to be reborn all over again after production was shut down during the pandemic.

It’s a good thing it was, because audiences will never have seen anything like it.

Do yourself a favour and catch it during its brief visits to Dundee and St Andrews this week.

Ragnarok is at Dundee Rep Theatre on February 20-21, then at the Byre Theatre, St Andrews, on February 23. It was seen at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh.