Puppetry is always a kind of necromancy. It is making the dead come alive. It is the unsettling, fascinating, magical experience of watching objects become people and then return back to objects again. There are few shows I’ve seen where this is more transparent than FigurenTheater Tübingen’s Salto.Lamento.

To an accompaniment of swooning, jazzy beats and a series of bizarre, haunting live instruments, the show’s lone puppeteer Frank Soehnle rushes across the stage conjuring his puppets into life one at a time.

These dark, beautifully delicate creatures never just arrive on stage. They rear up slowly, spindly hands appearing from piles of feathers and dead leaves, limbs unfolding from under long floating robes. The faces are always the last to arrive, haunted, hollow eyes finally revealed, gazing out at the audience after the body has already been jangling its dance of death for some time.

There is certainly something peculiarly medieval about the assortment of cloaked, masked creatures that skitter across the stage in front of us, inhabiting a shadowy, lonely world where contact with any other living thing is faint and fleeting. This is a beguiling, almost storyless universe made up of resonant images of death and transformation. A single sheet of white paper appearing to flutter up out of a draw and dance ecstatically in a thin beam of light. A gold ball being broken open to reveal a tiny white creature. And potentially most powerfully of all, a life-size human figure tearing off his strings, unshackling himself from his legs and dragging his bone-white torso toward the audience to topple over a bucket of ashy sand before collapsing in a heap. It is an image that is unnatural and unsettling, and yet that has hopefulness to it.  Like Bergman’s famous Dance of Death at the end of The Seventh Seal this is a show in which strangeness and fear are overcome by acceptance of the inevitable. And with that resignation comes a faintly delirious kind of peacefulness and joy that permeates all of the show’s bizarre episodes.

More than any of its startling imagery, or its sometimes laboured humour, what makes this show so fascinating is Soehnle’s presence as a lone puppeteer. He is magician in chief, moving from puppet to puppet with a slow delicacy that sets the rhythm for the show as much as Johannes Frisch & Stefan Mertin’s brilliant music. Dressed identically to his two musical accompanists, this puppeteer is no hidden figure all in black. He approaches each puppet with deliberate theatricality, breathing life into them with incredible tenderness. He gazes at the puppets and them at him, his movements mirror theirs, or maybe it’s the other way round. Beyond the moments when Soehnle is very clearly dancing with his creations, the whole show feels like a slow, hypnotizing dance of death between puppet and puppeteer. And if there is a figure of death in this dance it is the puppeteer himself, giving life and taking it away, leaving his creations hanging morbidly around the edges of the stage.

But it is the moment when he gives them life that really stick with you. When you see a delicate finger appear out of the folds of a cloak and gesture towards one of the musicians you can’t help but think for just a second that Soehnle might have managed the trick – that suddenly it’s two people and not one dancing in front of us.

The London International Mime Festival runs until 25 January 2009.