One of the more charming productions at the 2008 Cork Midsummer Festival was a non-verbal piece of work that explored theatre as joyous fantasy and magical possibility. Devised by Asylum Productions, Cleaner, which offered us a glimpse into the life of a bored housemaid, made use of mime, puppetry and movement over half an hour of playful fun within the intimate setting of the Unitarian Church in the city centre.

It is an interrogatory process that Asylum has clearly set about pursuing, and this year the company expands upon its initial inquiries with a darker, more surreal piece of work that explicitly uses human puppetry and elements of physical theatre to explore a subconscious world of deviant sexuality, lust and control. The puppetry, this time created through the use of blank-faced masks and actors facing backwards (but dressed back to front), becomes an integral facet in the creation of this subversive territory, a landscape of half fantasy, half nightmare that is set within a black frame in Olan Wrynn’s design, so that it becomes reminiscent of a giant 'Punch and Judy' show.

In this environment, the darkest recesses of our sexual imaginations are excavated, as they have been before in work such as Nabokov’s Lolita, and certainly the sight of Red Lola (Medb Lambert), in pigtails and school uniform, making eyes at the suited stranger (Marcus Bale) at the bus stop, conjures up immediate and obvious analogies with that seminal piece of literature. Meantime, in its disruption of the traditional fairytale narrative, this piece of theatre, directed by Donal Gallagher, also allows for comparisons – at least atmospherically – with the work of writer Angela Carter or Neil Jordan’s direction of The Company of Wolves.

And, indeed, it is in the creation of atmosphere that this short play achieves the greatest resonance. Although the narrative, such as it is, is a recognisable one in that it picks up on one of the overriding concerns of our times – the fear of ‘stranger danger’, or of our young people becoming vulnerable to molestation or abuse – this is not a realistic piece of work. Working in tandem with Wrynn, lighting designer Kath Geraghty fashions evocative, eerily sensuous images, while composer Linda Buckley twists around favourite children’s music such as 'The Teddy Bears' Picnic' so that the tune, as used in the piece, takes on a dark, almost sadistic note. Meantime, the puppetry and the use of the masks introduces a strange emotional detachment, so that what happens on stage resembles, but at the same time distorts, a familiar environment.

Despite its surrealistic nature, however, the drama still relies on a level of engagement with character and story in order that the audience keep its focus right until the end. But the structure of the play – it is staged in short scenes that come to resemble one another – means that rather than a developing narrative, it is difficult to gauge, at least after the first 20 minutes or so, what exactly it is attempting to tell us. The point of the drama, in theme and in staging, is rather quickly made; after that moment, everything else it has to offer turns into repetitive, or unnecessary information.

This is not to say that Red Lola is not an enjoyable, or even thought-provoking piece of work. It is simply that a tighter, more slimmed-down show would have sustained the drama’s initial impact, rather than allowing it to peter out into a play – though one of resonance, with a core of substance at its heart – that is obscured by less than rigorous editing, and a director’s hand that did not exercise as much authority as it could have. Pull away at it a little, and Red Lola could become something of as much uncomfortable engagement as is the novel – Lolita – from which it surely derives its title.

Rachel Andrews is an arts journalist and critic based in Cork.