Slick by name and conspicuously slick by nature. Here’s a show to gladden the hearts of those who admire the acting and writing of British theatre but hanker after the technical wizardry and punctilious attention to detail of companies with long pedigrees in Eastern Europe.

Produced by Vox Motus, a tiny company that consists of Candice Edmunds and Jamie Harrison, Slick uses a puppetry technique in which an actor’s head is superimposed on a small puppet body, the arms of which are operated by a puppeteer standing behind the actor. It’s an old trick, dating back at least to early 20th-century vaudeville (the Two Ronnies used it). The effect is at once comic and slightly sinister, a feeling intensified in the opening moments of the show when a character glares balefully at the audience and then flashes his grotesque puppet body at them.

Appropriately, the story told here is a grotesque comedy. It concerns the deeply unpleasant Biggar family, who discover oil in the lavatory of their Glasgow tenement flat. Having lost all their money in the credit crunch, Mr and Mrs Biggar (who might easily pass for a Glaswegian Ma and Pa Ubu) are greatly relieved by their find, but instead of passing their newfound wealth on to Malcolm, their skateboarding nine-year-old son, or even paying off their landlord (who rejoices in the name of Jerko Dreich), they want to keep it to themselves.

They even send Malcolm off on a dangerous mission to collect samples from all the other lavatories in the building, including Jerko’s and that of Jerko’s elderly mother, incarcerated on the top floor, to ensure that they are the only ones with oil.

In so far as it is about anything, Slick is about greed and selfishness and Malcolm’s coming of age (symbolised by his finally mastering a skateboard trick). The script is far from flawless, losing its way especially in a long scene between Malcolm and old Mrs Dreich.

The greatest pleasures, though, are in the wit and invention of the staging. There are just two carefully prepared trunks, which have myriad pull-up, fold-out, flip-down elements, all brilliantly designed and all on the same scale as the puppets.

By this simplest of means, we enter various apartments, we climb up the outside of the building, skateboard with Malcolm and end up in a rooftop shoot-out.

Guy Bishop is credited as the model-maker but the whole technical team, and the five performers, who also play each other’s puppeteers, are so fantastically well drilled that not a stitch is dropped. Jordan Young, as the gormless, put-upon Malcolm, is especially engaging.

Box office: 0131-228 1404, until August 24, and then touring Scotland until September 26. www.voxmotus.co.uk