Using found objects from Viennese flea markets and relics from New Zealand beaches, Wild Theatre’s Stonebelly conjures a dreamscape haunted by its instigator. In this desert of mirages, characters form and crumble, explore and disappear, destroy and reconstruct. This is a world of the other, yet for all its ephemeral abstracts and sinuous atmospheres, it’s less adventurous than it promises to be.

This entirely visual show, with a specially composed soundtrack, aims to explore the cracks of reality and the creatures that hide there. On three tall barrels lie three deserts of salt, barren and empty, awaiting their colonisers. Corrugated iron tools and discarded wooden vestiges begin to populate this strange world. Creatures shift, transform and explore in front of us, they contort, jump from one environment to the other, lonely in their otherness. It’s a set of dangerous and decrepit characters in search of a story.

This is perhaps the reason the show falls flat. Despite its visual language being highly developed and precise, it often lacks consequence and specificity. It’s a series of fragmented moments, some narrative and others iconographic. The objects are carefully chosen and wonderfully histrionic, colonising a sea of salt - forgotten vestiges that we spend so little time with.

Visual theatre doesn’t need a narrative, but it cannot survive without clear motifs and a real sense of purpose to its imagery. In Stonebelly, too many times a storm passes over the salt desert without it gaining any meaning; we leap from one creature to another without an opportunity to really delve into their otherness, their life in this desert of the haunted imagination. A clatter of bones amasses and crumbles, and we’re left longing for this transient creature.

It’s a shame, since the performance contains some highly engaging moments. It is the scenes so concerned with their own ritual that are most engaging. Moments when a creature rises from the desert and interacts with what it finds, exploring the dangers of its landscape until one of them is destroyed. The relationship between sound and image is at its most powerful when the two are in antithesis, changing the rhythm and emotional life of a scene. The show is often characterised by a haunting eeriness which gives it a level of unpredictability and sustains even the most problematic of scenes.

Humour plays a part too - objects topple over, creatures fall apart - but the show leaves little room for inconsistencies and accidents, so when they do happen, it is always without resolve. Surely this world with such fragmented micro-politics, is not an absolute one; by allowing for incidents to happen, it brings more credibility to an otherwise carefully crafted series of surprises.

Stonebelly is mixed bag of work, sometimes packed with wonderful surprises both dark and comic, and at other times too impenetrable and rushed. It certainly reveals the possibilities of object manipulation to create surreal, moving, living landscapes, and Wild Theatre hold the skill to bring these to life. It’s an atmospheric piece with potent metaphors, albeit scattered and fragmented.

Run over.