La Pendue: La Manékine review: puppets and dreams create an utterly strange fairytale

The Pit, Barbican, London
French company La Pendue’s MimeLondon curtain-raiser reimagines a Brothers Grimm tale with puppets and a one-man band

The poet Pierre Quillard, defending the symbolist performance of his play The Girl With the Severed Hands (premiered in Paris in 1891), described theatre as “an excuse to dream” – not as a way to escape reality but to experience it more fully in its extraordinary intensity.

La Manékine, by French puppet company La Pendue, opening the fortnight-long MimeLondon festival, is rooted in the same folk tale as Quillard’s play but adapted from the Brothers Grimm version of it (which also formed the basis of Kneehigh theatre’s 2011 The Wild Bride, and Sébastien Laudenbach’s haunting 2016 animated feature film The Young Girl Without Hands).