Reviews

Sorcerer Baklava
A World in your Shell-like
Puppet Centre Trust/BAC, Battersea
February 2005
Review by Cath Connolly
This piece was presented as a work in progress by this young company, prior to their taking it to the Edinburgh Fringe, August 2005.
The show began with the three female puppeteers walking to the front of the playing space and putting on enormous wellie-boots and disappearing underneath the set, which consisted of tables covered in white cloths and a big projection screen at the back. The wellies were our first clue to the recurring theme of nature and the elements and our relationship with our struggle against those forces which affect our daily lives. The puppets were table–top and the different scenes were made by ingenious use of cloth and clothing and everyday objects such as lampshades. There was a lovely shower of rain made by shaking a sleeping-bag over the main protagonist, and a fine drift of feathers tumbled from a squishy rain cloud.
The puppeteers played about with scale, having three diminishing sizes of the main character, a human-ish androgynous puppet with a soft leather skin, and a pet/companion which he/she met and befriended. At one point the puppets became so tiny that they were filmed and projected onto the screen as they battled their way up the side of a mountainous duvet whilst snow and wind pushed against them. The shell referred to in the title was given to the little person by a bird and whenever things got really tough, the puppet would put the shell to its ear and a beautifully calming melody was played, in contrast to the elemental chaos which was occurring.
The soundscape was an original composition and contributed greatly to the performance, enhancing the action onstage and reinforcing the fact that puppetry need not rely heavily on text and works so well with music. Although the show was low-tech and the design simple, there was judicious use of technology.
Lighting and projections were there to add to the performance and the lighting designer conjured up a desert and an ocean on the same plain white cloth, aided of course by some excellent manipulation. I particularly liked the depiction of the relationship between the puppet and his pet (dog? deer? I asked the puppeteers afterwards and it’s anything you want it to be) finding a poignancy there as they clung together on a raft, buffeted by the sea and at the mercy of the wind. I was sad when the show ended, so completely had they conjured up a world in which I could lose myself. Although there were some little mistakes and a feeling that the show could be a little longer, Sorcerer Baklava showed us what they are capable of achieving.

Spirit
The Little Angel Theatre, Islington
April 2005
Reviewed by Beccy Smith
Spirit’s subject matter was a weighty one – questioning the meaning we project onto contemporary life and living – but its touch was light. This may largely be attributed to the sensitive counter-pointing of verbal narrative (in the form of recorded interviews) with visual animation both scenic, puppetry and video (by Litza Jansz). There was a sense that the stage itself was suffused with sentience, movement and, well, spirit. The pleasure of watching the unfolding transformations perfectly balanced the various seriousness, mundanity and occasional bizarreness that emerged from the diverse voices and displaced subjectivity of the interviews.
The staging of the piece was continually surprising. Opening images of miniature animated scenes in William Beattie’s translucent, lit boxes stacked across the stage effectively and ingeniously created a sense of a teeming, multiplicitous world. A single piece of cloth anthropomorphising into a graceful dancing figure before vanishing back into shapelessness seemed perfectly to capture the sense of elusiveness characterising many of the interviewees’ sense of the subject matter. In rendering this, it suddenly seemed to matter less and we were led into a world where it was enough to be simply engaged by the diverse ideas of others on the theme, whilst your own imagination was stimulated by the images before you.
An extended contemplation on the possible meaning of it all, with an inspiring use of shadow, light, movement and manipulation (by the excellent Susan Beattie, Kate Middleton and Rob Humphries), Spirit managed successfully to avoid the earnest pitfalls of the subject matter, instead creating a theatrical experience which allowed the audience to experience sensually and emotionally the wealth of ideas it expressed. What a treat!

Little Angel Theatre
The Grass is Greener
The Little Angel Theatre, Islington
March 2005
Reviewed by Penny Francis
Directed by Steve Tiplady, the piece purports to be about the Turkish cousin of Punch, the anti-hero Karagoz and his sidekick Hacivat. It is aimed at children over five of both the Turkish and English-speaking communities, although, like Punch, Karagoz originated as a rebellious, priapic anti-hero and his author put to death by the Sultan.
In this version, we are at first treated to some shadow play which gently echoes the rumbustious slapstick and wordplay of the original, but the manipulation is not exact enough and much of the action, though based on original texts, is inconsequential. The performers are more at home with the glove figures that come later.
If ever a show cried out for a good writer or dramaturg this is it. The storyline involves a journey by Karagoz to London, and the idea of juxtaposing Karagoz and Punch, usually referred to as cousins, is a good one. Karagoz is given a hard time in England, press-ganged into working with Punch (a three-dimensional puppet of quite another aesthetic), but the story is without flow or tension, meaning that there is little of the attention captured by the ‘what’s going to happen next?’ factor. The children and I were, I’m afraid, restless and even bored.
However the good news is that the live voices of Ronnie Le Drew (especially) and Mohsen Nouri are strong and full of the energy the images and story lacked. What I will remember are some of the scenic shadow effects and transformations - modern, beautiful, magical - even if they do not accord with the aesthetic of the Turkish shadow characters or the English Punch. Sally Brown is the designer.
But by Little Angel standards disappointing, I’m sorry to say.