Water puppet show «Cá Chép Hóa Rồng» (The Carp Turns Into a Dragon)

   There is a stage in central Ho Chi Minh City that is really a pool. Puppets surface straight out of the water, spit fire and rain, and the performers stand waist-deep behind a painted bamboo screen, steering them with long poles hidden below the surface. If you want a Sunday outing that keeps children still and does not bore the adults who brought them, this is the one.

   The show retells one of the best-known Vietnamese legends: a carp swims upstream to Vũ Môn, the Dragon Gate, and whoever clears it becomes a dragon. A shrimp turns up wanting to sit the same «dragon exam», and that is where the comedy lives. By the end the carp, now a dragon, calls down rain and saves every living thing from drought. Coloured lighting, a brisk score, wisecracking dialogue and fire and water bursting off the pool carry the whole thing.

   Múa rối nước exists nowhere else. It grew out of villages in the Red River Delta, where farmers performed on flooded paddies and village ponds; the earliest written trace of water puppetry is on the Sùng Thiện Diên Linh stele, raised in 1121. The puppeteers work from behind a split-bamboo screen painted to look like the facade of a communal house, moving each figure with rods and cords that run underwater.

   The company is Rối Rồng Phương Nam, founded in 1978 and now part of the Ho Chi Minh City Arts Center. Director Trần Được, the troupe's deputy head, says staging and rehearsing one complete water puppet play takes six months to a year: every puppet has its own control mechanism and has to be learned separately before an artist can give the character any life. Vũ Duy Luân, one of the younger performers, came from straight theatre through a puppetry course the theatre ran, and has now spent five years on the water.

   The stage sits on the grounds of the Ho Chi Minh City History Museum, a 1926–1928 building in the Indochinese style by the French architect Auguste Delaval, right beside Thảo Cầm Viên — the Saigon zoo and botanical gardens, open since 1864. It is at the eastern edge of the old District 1, about 2.5 km from Ben Thanh Market, and museum, zoo and puppets together make an easy half-day.

   The show runs about 45 minutes, roughly as long as a small child will sit still, and the hall is compact enough that every seat has a clear view of the water. Adults on their own get their money's worth from the puppeteering technique alone.

   Performances fall on Sundays, with doors an hour before curtain. August has five — the 2nd, 9th, 16th, 23rd and 30th — and the next one after that is 1 September. A ticket is 150,000 VND, the same for adults and children, and zones A and B cost the same, so you are choosing a seat rather than a tier. The show is performed in Vietnamese, but there is very little talking in it: the story is told through the puppets, the music and the light, which is why foreign families sit through it as easily as local ones.

   Tickets are sold at the museum desk or online; for seating questions the hotline is 0931 477 699. Come early and you can walk the museum before the first carp appears.