B*tch Eat Dog ★★★

B*tch Eat Dog — ★★★

Puppets with vaginas. A uterus singing to a penis. A support group for dead hot dog buns. Welcome to Bitch Eat Dog, where children’s puppetry has grown up, discovered queer nightlife and made some deeply questionable life choices.

This late-night adult puppet sketch show is gloriously strange. A wonderfully bizarre host puppet guides us through a collection of sketches performed by a three-person team of puppeteers, musician, voices and general orchestrators of chaos.

Think Punch and Judy or Sooty and Sweep dragged through an adult late-night sketch comedy show and given a healthy dose of queer gender fuckery.

And yes, that’s a compliment.

The writing is clever, playful and packed with puns. Bitch Eat Dog isn’t afraid to experiment, bouncing between absurd characters and increasingly ridiculous scenarios. Some concepts are inspired purely because you have to wonder how anyone thought of them in the first place. The dead hot dog bun support group is a particular favourite, brilliantly stupid, or stupidly brilliant.

There’s also an impressive amount of craft on display. These puppets, props and sets didn’t magically appear, and you can see the enormous amount of work that has gone into building this peculiar little universe, not to mention getting the bloody thing to the Fringe.

The uterus is another standout. Its interactions with the penis are wonderfully ridiculous, but it’s what happens with the character towards the end that really lands. Underneath all the silliness, there’s a distinctly queer perspective running through the show, playing with bodies, gender and expectations without becoming weighed down by its own ideas.

Where B*tch Eat Dog needs development is in its rhythm. Some transitions between sketches run too long, allowing the energy to drop while the next piece is established. The production also loses some of its cohesion through the middle. Tightening those changes and sharpening the overall running order would help the madness build rather than periodically reset.

But there’s real gusto here.

It’s experimental, queer, handmade, unhinged and completely at home in a late-night Fringe slot. With another round of tightening, these puppets could really pull some strings.

If you’re after sophisticated restraint, keep walking. If you want a silly night of queer theatre featuring genitalia, hot dogs and puppets behaving very badly, B*tch Eat Dog might have its hand firmly up your alley.

★★★