Troll @ Underbelly

Troll’s debut show was a sleeper hit at last year's Fringe; its return is confirmation that it’s a beautifully daft gem, notable for the precision and patience of its clowning. The show opens in darkness, with stirring music and the sound of rain falling, as a voice intones the extraordinary news that, after thousands of years of absence, the trolls have returned. Two of them arrive – a little one (Anna Marie Simonsen) and a big one (Marie Kallevik Straume) – in green hoodies, green tights and fake rubber noses.

With a complete lack of self-consciousness and an incuriosity that feels very creaturely, they bark instructions at the audience (in Troll language) and no concessions are made – we either work it out or we don't. Later, when the little one clambers over and through the audience in the frenzied pursuit of a delicious smell, the heedless disregard of human conventions also feels distinctively animalistic. The quality of pure vacancy the pair summon is one of the great pleasures of the show.

The audience participation is another key part of its success: when completely confounded by the opening of a bottle, the trolls look to us for help – and a little girl in the front row tries patiently to explain a bottle opener. Later, they try to get their heads around the fact of a chair, an encounter which results in a hopeless slapstick tangle, only resolved when an audience member steps in.

It's all captivatingly silly stuff, and the duo's characterisation of their troll creations is a total joy.

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Troll, Underbelly Cowgate (Belly Laugh), run ended