When she was 13, Pithy Beane saw a painting in a library book of a naked young man being caressed by a swan as he hung, St Sebastian-like, from a tree.

When Ronnie Burkett was seven, he opened the World Book Encyclopaedia at the letter P and announced to his disbelieving parents, a probation officer and a housewife, that he was going to be a puppeteer.

Now Burkett is the leading purveyor of adult puppet plays and Beane is an eccentric but plain art historian searching obsessively for the mysterious subject of the painting. She is also the heroine of Provenance, Burkett's latest creation, a story about the importance of origins which characteristically blurs man and marionette in the telling.

Specialising in elaborate, provocative and intensely insightful theatre, Canada's Burkett formed the Theatre Of Marionettes in 1986 in order to rescue puppetry from the school circuit and return it to adult theatre.

If it wasn't for the 30 or so puppets he so sensitively brings to life, his plays would all be one-man shows. Burkett is at once the author, designer, director and puppeteer and, in this production, he is for the first time a visible and personal presence, often voicing characters while their bodies remain hanging in the closet.

When it comes to plots and themes, you'd imagine that working with jointed dolls would necessarily simplify matters. But Burkett, whose wooden puppets are all both beautifully and grotesquely human, has always believed his work is about "shrinking people down in order to take a closer look".

Hence his formative Memory Dress Trilogy, two of which were Brighton Festival sell-outs, didn't shirk from such topics as Aids, the Holocaust and the Second Coming.

And hence the characters of Provenance, who sing, waltz and ice-skate their way across a lovingly detailed art nouveau stage, also fall victim to homophobia, misogyny and rape.

While children should certainly be deterred by this, adults (with the notable exception of America, where Burkett has vowed never to return) have delighted in the eroticism, exoticism and wit. As Beane's quest takes her across the Atlantic to the art metropolis of Vienna, she encounters a roller-skating monkey, a bonkers brothel keeper and a Japanese businessman set on eating sushi from a virgin's body.

And when she finally uncovers the riddle of the painting's provenance, it's the sort of revelation highbrow thriller writers would die for.

"It's about beauty and what people do to be near beauty, or to possess it, or to become it," says Burkett. "When we desire or objectify a person in our lives, we don't really need to know their back story. It's better if they stay two-dimensional to satisfy our fantasies."

A fantasy about fantasies, Provenance should prove both dark and comic, bawdy and tender. But two-dimensional it ain't.

Starts 7.30pm. Tickets £18/£12.50, call 01273 709709.