Charleville Festival de Marrionettes

When I told friends I was going to watch puppets in France, their eyes had this strange habit of glazing over - focus shifting to the middle distance, unsure of the correct response, as some kind of felt-sock creation for kids danced in their minds. But even half a day at Festival de Marrionettes – the world ‘s largest puppet theatre festival - would convince the most strident string hater that professional puppetry is far from the school assembly’s warm-up.

Every three years, the quaint but quiet Ardennes town of Charleville-Mézières has its very streets come alive as this World Cup of puppetry puts up its stalls. And there's a lot of them - 120 companies from 23 countries offering artistic wares from traditional Indonesian shadow puppetry and giant Japanese bunraku to Italian Ponchinelle.

But the most compelling moments come from the experimental mixing of style and techniques to form avant-garde physical and object theatre and unique visual feats. Stuffed foxes and men made out of rocks are just some of the strange characters to litter the streets, with Belgian genii Mossoux Bonte using such found objects to transport their audience to an unsettling, imagined landscape.

Nicole Mossoux impresses too, transforming everyday items into near real creatures with a turn of her hand. You'll believe a scuttling furball eats an egg laid by a green “chicken” – itself newly formed from some piping and a plastic sack. Then dozens of creations spring forth from the darkness, with inspired movements matched to a machinistic electronic soundtrack making them larger than their form. They dance their crazed dance before Mossoux casts them from her bench to immobility and death. The watering can is no longer a lover – it is a sad piece of plastic with a spout. She herself casts off masks and wigs, and becomes a spider woman, as an unstoppable monster suddenly springs from her knee.

For repeat visitors to Edinburgh’s Manipulate Visual Theatre Festival, such performances may become a disorientating attack on the senses, but those with less ethereal tastes need not dismiss the puppeteer’s art . The clowning of La Barbiere Singuliere (The Unusual Barber) turns a trip to the beauty parlour into a delightful physical theatre. And Compagnie Alea’s female double act could have been complete without each woman’s manipulation of a glove puppet twin. But the pair’s miniature avatars give the skit an extra dimension as the comically coiffed woman’s trip to the barber turns into a violent farce of Punch and Judy proportions. The small characters mock movement and size – and comfortably distance extreme actions from the realms of the real.

Another production – Braquage, by the French company Compagnie Bakelite, finds humour in the gadgetry of puppetry. A robbery is recounted through junk found in a garage where a collection of detergent bottles are also the New York skyline and filmed lips becomes a gangster when perfectly positioned in a moving car door. Digital media was fused with automated detritus like piggybanks and cookie jars with endless ingenuity.

This technically dexterous show demonstrates how skillful puppet animation can transform reality, create narratives and simply wow. If you weren't lost with a watering can as a suitable love interest, then perhaps there's a hope for puppetry yet. The physicality and craftsmanship showcased at Festival des Marrionettes is much than shabby chlidsplay – this is theatre with extra art.