Last year at the festival, Sammy J in the Forest of Dreams was a big hit, taking out the Critic’s Award. This year, the co-writer and performing puppeteer from that show, Heath McIvor, is taking the Randy character and giving him his own show. Randy’s Postcards From Purgatory is a wonderful evocation of Randy’s life as he deals with a mid-life crisis brought about by love and longing. Heath’s skills as a puppeteer are so adept you can forget it’s a puppet and just laugh along with his narration. Even when a stray piece of cotton hung off Randy’s mouth or his hair fell awkwardly the character reacted with annoyance, flicking or blowing it away as a human performer would. It’s remarkable.

Randy is a rough-around-the-edges character, and despite his friendly pink furriness there’s a lot in the show that isn’t child-friendly (including the stripper’s pole up the back of the Portland Hotel room it’s housed in). The humour doesn’t come from seeing a puppet swear, though, but from Randy’s character and the way he looks back over his adventurous life. He’s been to London, he’s been to hippy communes, and he’s been to a lot of kids’ parties. Now he’s trying to make sense of it all so he can head into the future with new insights like ‘how you manage your attraction, makes you a man’. The storytelling is fast and effective, focussing on Randy’s relationships and letting the crowd imagine his world.

McIvor, through Randy, is a gifted storyteller and with only the help of an occasional prop he created a wholly believable world that entertained and got a lot of laughs as well. The show makes my top three for the festival.