Bark Bark, a new show from Buzzcut Productions, had its premiere at The North Wall last week. The promotional materials billed it as a "High Tech Two Hander" and “an innovative multimedia show combining puppetry and live camera work” - so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but I was intrigued.

Laika is an award-winning agility dog, inherited by Laura and her boyfriend Peter, a couple whose relationship is offering diminishing returns. When Laika freezes on her last agility run, Peter and Laura try to figure out a solution.

Anytime I hear of animal puppetry in a stage show, I think of Warhorse. I was imagining a spindly dog puppet on a leash, being manipulated by the actors. Instead, the show is divided into two mediums - scenes of actors onstage, interspersed with scenes of puppetry enacted on miniature stages, live-streamed to a screen above the actors’ heads. Laika the puppet, a little paper mache Whippet around the size of a block of butter, only appears in the live video puppetry bits. In the scenes with the actors, they simply gesture to the place the dog would be. This choice serves them well, feeling wiser and more trusting than using a stuffed animal.

The scenes of puppetry are truly innovative and mesmerising. The production uses a modified dolls’ house to replicate the country house belonging to Laika’s former owner that Peter and Laura are currently staying in. The puppeteers use two fake paws on sticks to film scenes of Laika handling different objects. A piece of artificial grass on two rollers becomes a sprawling green lawn for Laika to bound across. Pringles cans are used as special lenses for certain shots. The uncanniness of the perspective nicely conveys a dog’s slightly alien point of view.

There’s an indie kitsch-ness to it, that made me think of Miranda July or Charlie Kaufman. In particular, it shared the poignant ambivalence of Anomalisa, Kaufman’s unsettling stop-motion gem. It’s absorbingly scruffy - fingers manipulating the puppets sneak into the frame, and occasionally the camera’s focus needs slight adjusting mid-scene. Here, the art itself exists partly in seeing how the sausage gets made.

There’s an extended sequence ending the first half, where Laika dreams of being launched into space, backed by delicate, soaring live vocals, that’s weirdly and deeply moving.

Elsewhere, the sound mixing was at times uneven - the actors were slightly too quiet, and the effects were slightly loud. And, despite two solid performances from the actors playing Peter and Laura, the scenes of the couple paled in comparison to the rest of the material. The dialogue was by no means terrible, but it lacked memorability. I wanted bigger personalities and more of a sense of zaniness and surreality to match the rest of the production.

But that’s a fairly minor criticism for a production that entertained and impressed me, and built to an emotional, well-earned ending. I’m excited to see what Buzzcut Productions does next.