Olivier Rannou's family-friendly spaghetti western starts with our hero looking as stranded and desolate as one of Samuel Beckett's anti-heroes. Parched and prone across a table, knotted handkerchief on his head, he's marooned in a desert with a water bottle full of sand, a desperate thirst, and a scattering of human skeletal remains. Because nothing says 'fun for the kids' like existential dread and a side of memento mori.

Rannou, who also designed the set, keeps an edge of existential angst while becoming more clown-like by turns. Through movement, expression, and sound, he shows us this cowboy is a wanted man, on the run, wrestling with the dangers of his barren, unpeopled surroundings. There's the hallucinatory sound of dripping water, a fight with a rattlesnake, and a saloon bar shootout - all enacted solely through mime and clowning, with props like a snake conjured from string and cacti from planks of wood. Because why use real cacti when you have carpentry skills and a sense of whimsy?

Émilie Rougier's electronic compositions charge the atmosphere with danger and flip the mood from light to dark. Sometimes it sounds like an electric didgeridoo; other times, tinkly fairground tunes. Alan Floc'h and Alexandre Musset's lighting design evokes a relentlessly glaring desert sun or eerie night, depending on whether you're in the mood for heatstroke or goosebumps.

It's comic, cartoonish, and brooding - a Beckettian sense of 'failing better' as Rannou stoically fends off Road Runner-like mishaps. Produced by French theatre company Bakélite, it's an eccentric and entertaining show. Rannou brings great, easy physicality, though some of it feels rather abstract, and you wonder where this one-man spaghetti western is going or what it's ultimately saying. But then, does a mime ever need to explain itself?

A highlight is the visual playfulness of the set. The original table morphs into ever bigger, more elaborate objects, including a wooden horse that comes to life and slowly clops off the stage. It's all constructed, carpenter-like, before our eyes - a delightful act of wood origami. It absolutely amuses, but as a wordless show that doesn't try to explain itself, it's rather bemusing too. Catch it at Church Hill theatre, Edinburgh, until 11 August, and ponder the meaning of it all - or just enjoy the clowning.