A new show uses puppets to tell the extraordinary story of the late Agnes Bernelle. Tony Clayton-Lea reports

In some ways it's almost as if Agnes Bernelle had never gone away. Those of us who saw her perform will recall her poise, her impish humour and her artful material. An original, she influenced Tom Waits, Elvis Costello and The Pogues; more recent acolytes include Jack L and Camille O'Sullivan. To be honest, though, there's nothing like the real thing. When she died, in the late 1990s, she was buried with her feather boa, defiantly draped, just so, on her coffin.

This week, at Project arts centre in Dublin, she will return from cabaret heaven and continue her good work. She will enter its small theatre and berate the audience for having presumed her dead. She just popped out for a cigarette, that's all, and now she's back.

In Songs In Her Suitcase - Performed Live By The Late Agnes Bernelle, mask, film, music and puppetry will allow her to give us an insight into her long and fascinating journey from Hitler's Berlin and the risqué stages of Soho to her influence on Dublin punk rock - from Goebbels to Guggi, if you will - in one long, flourishing swish of that boa.

Directed by Leticia Agudo, with puppetry by Niamh Lawlor and musical direction by Philip Chevron, formerly of The Pogues, the show will then tour the country. It won't be the first time Bernelle has played the provinces with strings attached, but it just might be the first time audiences get a real notion of the woman behind the make-up.

Lawlor was bitten by the Bernelle bug some years ago; she had seen her perform but had been too shy to introduce herself. Then she read Bernelle's funny, touching and ultimately celebratory autobiography, The Fun Palace. It stopped in 1963, Bernelle's intention having been to write a second volume to cover the time up to her involvement with the bands Radiators from Space and the Virgin Prunes. But it was not to be, and Lawlor was eager to know what happened next.

After a year of making puppets, working on the script and having coaching to make her voice sound like Bernelle's, genteel and lived in, Lawlor covers not only her subject's creative life but also the woman behind the performer - the mother, wife and other offstage roles - all of which informed her work but which people know little about. Most famously, for example, Bernelle battled a brain tumour that some had said was fatal by putting herself on a macrobiotic diet. She was also resilient and stubborn, towards the end of her life sneaking out from a hospice to appear in low-budget films.

Chevron, as the man she asked to archive her music, was an obvious candidate to be involved in the show. He didn't know much about the mechanics of puppet theatre but accepted, in the spirit of his mentor, the gauntlet thrust down in front of him. "I thought I'd throw myself in at the deep end and see what happens. It's always a challenge, and you may not get another chance to do it. I also felt it would appeal to Agnes that her life story was going to be told by puppets and that it would be her first posthumous performance. It was so in keeping with her view of the world and herself that it seemed spot on."

Chevron first met Bernelle in the mid-1970s, when he was 16 and she was in her 50s. It was a Damascene experience: that anyone of her creative plumage could exist in the dirty greyness of Dublin was vitally enriching. Connecting with a mutual sense of rootlessness, Chevron and Bernelle's geographical and artistic compasses each pointed north; the pair had an interesting journey to nowhere in particular, a sense of not really belonging anywhere - but coming to a reasonably sensible accommodation with the fact.

Bernelle, according to Chevron, was a beacon of light in 1970s Dublin for "the possibilities that exist for certain people". They had spoken of putting her life on stage some time before she died, but "there never seemed to be enough time or resources for various people to commit to it. But I've no doubt she felt there was some reason behind making me trustee of her music archive, because she knew it was not going to get lost in the mists of time".

He points out that her work continues in many ways besides the new show: her mid-1980s album Father's Lying Dead On The Ironing Board was a huge influence on Tom Waits's Rain Dogs. What were The Pogues listening to when they were making If I Should Fall From Grace With God? Rain Dogs, of course.

"I love the fact that music always continues," says Chevron, who despite not being thoroughly au fait with the puppeteering way of life can at least view the show as a continuation of Bernelle's edgy, puckish aesthetic. "It takes on a life beyond what its creators ever expect of it, and so it always should. Once you've done something it ceases to be your property to a large extent, anyway. You have to let it go and allow it to fend for itself in the world and hope that it meets the right people. You hope that it doesn't make unholy alliances."

Songs In Her Suitcase - Performed Live By The Late Agnes Bernelle opens at Project, Dublin, on Wednesday, with a preview tomorrow. It runs there until June 12th, then tours