Endearingly surreal musician and puppet-maker Matthew Robins is more than a one-man band: he’s almost a one-man theatre. Almost but not quite. Despite the large backing band, this over-extended two-and-a-quarter-hour show feels too much like a solo and is a cumbersome showcase for his and his creations’ elusive charm.
‘Flyboy Is Alone Again This Christmas’ is a collection of slightly macabre musical short stories, some of which star Flyboy (a mutant boy who likes his best friend ‘Mothboy’ a little more than Mothboy likes him). Flyboy and Mothboy’s houses and other scenarios (like the planet where snowmen go after they melt) are scissored with uncanny skill from black paper, and manipulated as shadow puppets by Robins’s assistant, Tim Spooner. Robins himself rattles various kinds of ivories and sings.
Despite the artful strangeness of each vignette, they add up to less than the sum of their parts. The energy picks up when the audience is challenged to make its own dinosaur puppets in the interval. But the sweetly aimless melodies and well-nigh winsome stories (starring affection-seeking outsiders like Nosferatu or a terminal woollen creature called Walter Knitty) create a mood more effectively than telling a story.
This minutely crafted tribute to nostalgia, disappointment and the power of the imagination will appeal to your inner Peter Pan, but needs a more fluid space or firmer organisation if it’s aiming for a wider audience.