Can you be a happy clapper if your hands are covered in glove puppets?

The answer is a resounding no in Robert Askins’ play HAND OF GOD.

Actually, the title is a lie. The hand puppet is a full sleeve serpent named Tyrone, a puppet that possesses Protestant pap, Jason, in the tiny, conservative town of Cypress, Texas.

When he joins his recently widowed mother Margery’s Christian Puppet Ministry at the local church, Jason thinks it’s a lame way to come to Jesus.

Turns out he’s right.

Tyrone the puppet, a projection of all his pent up anger and frustrations with the Church and his mother, is the devil in disguise, a slithering sex fiend that puts Jason up to his arm pits in the pits of hell.

As the arm of Armageddon, he ferments an illicit carnal affair between the school bully and his mother, and persuades the girl-next-door to perform perverted puppet acts.

Directed by Alexander Berlage , Hand to God is a blasphemous black comedy (with puppets) that is intermittently funny, but like liturgical literature, repetitive and regurgitated.

Philip Lynch plays Jason/Tyrone with nerdy ticks and nerdier ventriloquism.

Former Play School presenter, Merridy Eastman is a stand out as Jason’s mum, trying so hard to hold on to her faith against all the bitter disappointments life has thrown her.

Gerard Carroll plays a wayward priest hell bent on darning a sock puppet to hell.

Ryan Morgan plays bad boy delinquent who delights in seducing Jason’s mother.

Michelle Ny is the girl next door whose sexorcism works a whole lot better than the pastor’s attempt at exorcism.

Giving the deity the digit and the faithful the finger is part and parcel of this part puppet pandemonia, a chaotic, over stretched two hours. Not quite palm of the hand stuff and just one thumb up.

HAND OF GOD plays The Old Fitzroy till March 26