This dreamlike fable is a truly magical show

Agirl is perched on an enormous satellite dish, swinging her legs as she watches the sunset. She’s only a silhouette, a paper cut-out, but a range of emotions plays across her face.

She turns to climb down a ladder and is transformed into a living actor. But the ladder she’s climbing is no more real than the painted sky. Shadow-puppetry wizards Manual Cinema had a complete sell-out hit last year with their Fringe debut ADA/AVA, and Lula del Ray deserves the same reception. The Chicago company shows its workings as we watch the cast move scraps of card and cloth across three overhead projectors, the kind you might recall from school science lessons. Together, these create the heart-wrenchingly beautiful backdrops that appear on a screen upstage. When an actor steps between light and screen, they add their own shadow to the mise en scène, allowing a human to swap places seamlessly with their tiny paper counterpart.

The story is slight, but moving – a wordless, dreamlike fable set against the backdrop of the Fifties space-race. A girl and her radio-operator mother share a caravan in the desert. She runs away to the city to meet her favourite band (the fictional Baden Brothers), discovers her idols have feet of clay, and returns home older and wiser. The emotional impact comes partly from an enchanting live soundtrack, scored for guitar and cello, which includes snippets of a recurring melody: the Baden Brothers’ Roy Orbison-esque ballad Lord, Blow the Moon Out Please.

At the end of the show, the audience are invited onstage to handle the props, and admire the work that went into each transition. Learning how it’s done only adds to the magic.