Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’ is a seminal expression of the wordless torment of Man trapped in a Godless world. The famous figure at the painting’s centre has a ghostly liminality, its silent shriek redolent of the desperate loneliness at the centre of all human endeavour. But it’s well funny when replaced with a goggly-eyed green puppet.

Shitty Deal Puppet Theatre has two back-to-back shows at the tiny Vault venue – a A Complete Guide to the Arts and A Complete History of Oppressed People Everywhere! Both are handmade and irreverent. The star of ‘The Scream ‘is one Burp, a green muppety puppet, who along with Bobby, Dr Sludge Bucket, Mr Doper, and a gaggle of other assorted toys and Anglo-American human helpers, delivers the two short, satirical, potted histories. 

While each piece is bound together by a narrative thread (ie. History), essentially both are fast-paced sketch shows. In the Guide to the Arts there are some brilliant moments – Burp rendering ‘The Scream’, a fantastic skit on Apocalypse Now - featuring a yellow rubber glove and a sinister Colonel Kurtz (part Gingerbread man, part Zippy) and later the appearance of two wonderfully realised French puppets. But it’s the second show of the night (the Complete History of Oppressed People Everywhere!) that has more bite, with the puppet who portrayed Kurtz reappearing as an equally chilling Karl Marx.

If you see both shows, then you’ll get a feeling of de ja vu to start with, as a bearded human introduces them with the same spiel. Also, both are framed in the same way: Mr Doper, a sock puppet who looks like one of Stephen King’s milder nightmares, lectures Bobby, a sweet and innocuously designed grey bear, with a difficult home life. De ja vu could also surface if you’ve seen Avenue Q, or come across the National Theatre of Brent’s The Arts and How They Was Done, 1066 and All That or the animation of Terry Gilliam. In their form, and some of their content, Shitty Deal’s two shows aren’t original, but they are fun. And it’s well worth sitting out the odd saggy gag (the Dickensian parody could happily be cut) to get to the end and the best-laid joke about genocide, ever.