Puppetry for adults is still a rarity in this country, although companies such as Doo Cot and visitors from abroad such as Ronnie Burkett are proving that complex ideas and emotions can be expressed in the form. Stephen Mottram is a leader in the field: his extraordinary and visionary production of The Seed Carriers, inspired by Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene, is one of the best pieces of puppet theatre I've ever seen.

This series of six short pieces doesn't have the sustained brilliance or intellectual and emotional depth of that performance, but the combi nation of Mottram's skill with marionettes and Glyn Perrin's superb electronic music, which mixes hurdy gurdy with stone and metal or interweaves sampled elements with field recordings, creates tiny complete worlds full of suspense, surprise and sometimes foreboding.

Each of the six pieces is separate but there appears to be a common thread, a sense of wonder at the world conjured through a series of magic tricks. In Animata, a figure crawls on all fours and in a superhuman effort walks on its hands; a tightrope walker makes precarious progress and a trapeze artist suspended only by the toes flies through the air. In Bird, the body of an ostrich-like creature becomes an egg that opens to reveal a baby bird. Troubled Repose is a sightless dream in which the sleeper is attacked by a glittering belly-dancing fly. In one of the segments the puppet is there but not there; in another a white rabbit appears out of a hat.

What's interesting about the performance is the way it creates a recognisably human world using marionettes that are often as blank as dummies. Somewhere in the space between the action and the music, it is the audience's own imaginative response that brings this strange, eerie world fully and gloriously alive.

• Tonight at the Pleasance, London N7 (0171 609 1800) and tomorrow at the Swan, High Wycombe (01494 512000).