There is a point in ‘Hanging By a Thread’ when a demure girl puppet is raped by some tangled wool that happens to be wandering through the countryside as she sleeps. Quite why this happens, or what it means, or even if it has really happened at all, is never made clear. In fact, confusion seems to be devisers the Ding Foundation’s primary aim.
The piece opens with a performer swaddled in knitwear gradually emerging from a knitted bed and placing a knitted cow on to the landscape of the lower bed. The figure’s near-lifesize puppet assistant enters and helps it knit a model of a house. This pattern is repeated, resulting in something that turns out to be a tiny dress. The knitter is much taken with the dress and refuses to take its sleeping pill. There is then a strange sequence in which the assistant is wooed by a tiny, fey male puppet, who may or may not turn out to be the woolly rapist.
The problem is that the Ding Foundation appears to be trying very hard to tell a story, but simultaneously refusing to say what it is. The company keeps breaking the internal rules and logic of the show, which initially seems interesting, but rapidly starts to look like lazy thinking. The puppetry itself is pretty poor, which, coupled with several ponderous passages, makes for an unrewarding overall experience.
