A Brazilian puppet company staging the works of Samuel Beckett using Japanese puppet techniques: Beckett himself, you might think, couldn't dream up anything quite so surreal. But Luis Andre Cherubini, director of Grupo Sobrevento, makes it sound like the most natural thing in the world. On a crystal-clear phone line from his home in Santa Maria near the Uruguayan border, he explains that the company, founded in 1986, has eight shows in repertoire at any given time. "They are very, very different shows - for children, for adults, for open-air spaces, for theatres - and they use very different techniques, also. For our show The King Ubu, for example, we use cloths that turn our bodies into a kind of bag that moves; we also work with a Chinese glove technique that is very, very difficult. To help us learn this technique we brought to Brazil the most important puppeteer in China."

How, then, did they get involved with the highly stylised Japanese bunraku technique? "We saw many bunraku shows, in Brazil and at other international festivals," says Cherubini. "We read a lot about it, and we asked the Japanese embassy here to send us many videos and books about bun- raku. What we use is not exactly the Japanese technique, but an adaptation. We call it `direct manipulation'. We still have three puppeteers to move each puppet, as they do, but we don't use the same kind of stylised movement that they use."

Sobrevento's Beckett show consists of three short plays, Act Without Words, Act Without Words II and Ohio Impromptu. In the first play a single character tries, in vain, to come to terms with the series of random objects which surround him. In the second, two sleeping characters are woken by a pointed instrument, carry out some everyday activities and go back to sleep. Ohio Impromptu sees one man reading stories to another, observing all the while that "little is left to tell". It is, says Cherubini, like a play in three acts, with puppets being used for the first two acts only. But, he adds mysteriously, "the idea of puppets is also in Ohio Impromptu - the idea of puppets, but not exactly puppets".

It all, admittedly, sounds very Beckettian. Why, though, did they decided to apply this bunraku technique to their staging of Beckett, in particular? "Actually," says Cherubini, "we decided to do Beckett at the same time we adopted the technique. In his `act without words' plays, Beckett gave a lot of importance to movement - and when a puppet holds a cube, or when it walks, the walk itself gains a lot of importance. It's not the same movement a man can do. "When you manipulate a puppet it's impossible to have a casual movement - for example, if he scratches himself, it's a decision and not something that just happens. There's a lot of precision and the movements are more clear. And also the puppets don't have the individuality an actor has. An actor is always a man, but a puppet is a symbol of mankind."

Sobrevento's Beckett show has been highly praised within Brazil for its subtle use of humour - something which amuses Luis Andre Cherubini. "Here in Brazil, the performances of Beckett didn't used to be funny," he says, with a chuckle. "A lot of people forgot that Beckett is very humorous. But we think that the tragedy in Beckett comes from the humour. In our performance people laugh a lot; but at a certain point they stop laughing, because there's no sense in laughing at a puppet. This is the idea we try to develop, that there's not humour and tragedy together, but the tragedy comes from the humour."

A Brazilian puppet company staging Beckett using Japanese techniques: is he worried about how Dublin audiences will react? "We are not exactly worried, but we feel - very tense," he says. "Very honoured and very tense, because Dublin is the land where Beckett was born and so it's very important for us."

After the Dublin shows, the seven-person Sobrevento team is off to Glasgow and to the Madrid festival. "It's very difficult for a Brazilian group to travel," says Cherubini. "But we do travel a lot and for us the Beckett show is always a . . . a defy? No. A challenge."

Beckett runs at the Project Cube from October 9th to 14th