Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2008
There were puppets a-plenty at this year’s Fringe,
as witnessed by Beccy Smith and Darren East
The
whisper on the street was that this wasn’t a vintage year at the festival.
Drenched and disheartened, critics trawled from venue to venue muttering about
three-star shows and filling the vacuum left by an absence of buzz with dark looks
and darker blogs.
For puppetry, however, the winds were more auspicious. Year on year the presence of puppetry at the Fringe has been on the up and 2008 brought not only a bumper crop of new puppet performances (not to mention the return of some old favourites) but also an astonishing diversity of styles and approaches. In a five-day visit these critics were not actually able to see every show featuring puppetry in the programme – although it was a noble attempt to break the back of it. In a programme where puppetry was until recently ghettoised amidst the children’s pages, productions had colonised every section from dance to comedy, with a diverse tranche of theatre in between.
| This proliferation itself permitted a different perspective on
the puppetry, throwing the form into relief by the variety of stories and
figures on display, making the choices to use puppets and the ways in which
they were used more visible. Some productions emphasised form over substance,
enjoying using puppetry just a little too much to keep an eye on its role in
their drama. In The Time Step, created by Linda Marlowe (who co-directed with
Josie Lawrence and also starred), an expressive table-top figure designed by
Nick Barnes from Blind Summit had been selected as a neat formal articulation
of character but such formal shorthand drowned the crudely manipulated figure
under metaphorical overload. It made sense as a dramaturgical choice to have
the character of the small child, a pawn in the desperate and somewhat bizarre
games of dysfunctional mother-daughter tap-dancer wannabes, appear as a puppet.
Sadly the abuse the character suffered at the hands of his family was mirrored
in the performance’s overall effect, which threatened to vanish the character
into symbol – it meant so much that the character was a puppet that it
didn’t matter who he was at all. In a naturalistic context this proved deadly
and, although using puppetry in the context of ‘new writing’ is to be lauded,
sadly this production became an example of the pitfalls innate in colliding
these approaches without due diligence to the needs of each form. (To be fair,
it didn’t seem that Matthew Hurt’s writing had received much concentrated
attention either, but juxtaposing script with puppet served only to emphasise the
shortcomings of both.) |
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But this was not the only show in which the
balance of form to content was out-of-sync. For a show that aimed to tell a
story with no words whatsoever (and only cheated a little bit), Lost in the
Wind, first production by young Bristol company Lost Spectacles, got off to an
admirably clear start: a man set out to travel with a suitcase and a large map.
To his dismay the weather, a major player in this production, stepped in
– and the wind instantly whipped away the map. It was found and seized
upon by four mysterious clown characters who divided it up between them. At
first, the traveller’s interactions with this strange group, and his
observations of their comic rituals, were intriguing. But after a while, with
the narrative seemingly stuck, it started to feel more like a series of theatre
exercises: newspaper games, a dancing puppet figure of a dead husband contrived
from hat and plastic tubing, a song constructed from each character’s favourite
vegetable, the balloon as symbol of fragility, a suitcase pursuit, a truly
mystifying whose-line-is-it-anyway sketch on a submarine... |
While always done with precision and energy,
these tended toward subroutines, demarcated with their own soundtracks. One
particularly memorable sequence used a small puppet figure, constructed from
newspaper and other jetsam, who struggled to climb a suitcase before jumping or
falling from it – only to be swept away by the wind on his carrier-bag
parachute. It was deftly done, and would have been genuinely touching if there
had been some deeper understanding of who he was, and what hewas up to. With
story forsaken for spectacle, you need to polish the specs. Luckily, the Lost
Spectacles have a big wind machine and they aren’t afraid to use it, to fill the
stage with a blizzard of paper from which the poetic, inquisitive clowns
escaped but which buried the hapless traveller, in a fatal metaphor for the
futility of waiting for certainty. Committed and generous performers, I felt
Lost Spectacles had much more to offer than, in this show, they allowed
themselves to – at times the somewhat mannered clowning, rather than
opening up communication with the audience, felt like a restriction – or
a safety net. With these clowns a little too much in mock-childlike awe of
their own creations, I wanted a better foil than the mundane traveller to
unsettle the happy idiots. Nevertheless, there was much skill and imagination
here and it will be interesting to see where the company goes next.
In Anonymous Theatre Ensemble’s Wanderlust
the cocktail of forms was heady: aiming to combine theatre, club and cabaret,
the show drew together burlesque and puppetry (an enticing combination), circus
skills and some rather baffling storytelling. This is the most participatory
show I’ve ever not-been-able-to-simply-witness, with the audience drawn out of
their seats by our host, the ten-foot Bavarian Hilda, within minutes of the
lights going down and sharing the stage space with her thereafter, assisting
with storytelling including creating a circus tent with her voluminous skirt,
playing various characters and making one another feel good (via massage, drum
’n’ bass dancing and sharing shots of vodka). Puppetry feels very steeped
within the language of this world, with its extravagant meta-theatre, the
grotesque and fabulous scene it conjured (from the circus to the Bible with a
lot of folksy, dirty deeds along the way) all told through a melodramatic,
macabre Germanic drawl. Yet, strangely the puppetry felt the most conventional
aspect of the show, with the exception of a tiny bit of glove puppetry enacted
inside her costume (and couple of token, though memorable vodka bottle
puppets), we were directed to look at a simple, shabby flat screen over the
auditorium where film of some Pierrot-style figures exposited some back story
and a bit of filthy shadow play didn’t draw a veil over anything. This was a
bizarre, baffling, but ultimately entertaining evening: however the puppetry,
though competent, didn’t really find its place within the baroque storytelling
as a whole.
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A very different triumph of form over substance came in the
idiosyncratic vision of Russia’s Sharmanka’s Kinetic theatre. Completely
filling the chancel-like cavern of Theatre Workshop’s space, aesthetically,
this was a rare gem tucked far from the Royal Mile and the increasingly
southern heart of the festival. Sharmanka is Russian for hurdy-gurdy and the
company have adopted the name to contain the sense of art through mechanics
articulated by their gothic automata in which reconstituted relics of craft and
industry are peopled by tiny carved anthropomorphs who crawl and spin, run and
cry in the endless march of man against machine. The machines, of course are
both literal – this was a vision saturated in a Marxist view of man’s
humility amidst industry – and metaphorical: clockwork was repeatedly
evoked as an image and the sense of scale in the relationship of man’s
aspiration to a faceless world was redolent throughout. There were subtler
interpretation to be made – the titles of the various sculptures that
cyclically came to life – the Brainwashing Machine, The Apple Eaters;
Master and Margarita – referenced philosophy, cultural history, politics,
and the world was saturated with sex and death, hope and fantasy. For mechanical
objects the rhythm and tone were surprisingly varied, helped along by some
rather unsubtle selections of soundtrack and lurid (though beautifully staged)
lighting. There was beauty here too and an exciting sense of showmanship but
ultimately the show was circumscribed by its form: no matter how baroque and
colourful the invention, the sense of the whole could be summarised in the
final image of a tiny mechanical man, pedalling, alone in the darkness,
powering he knows not what. |
The undeniable skills of maker Eduard
Bersudsky underpinned this virtuoso production and elsewhere the exemplary
skills of other international companies were much in evidence, particularly at
Hill St Theatre which was effectively running a Polish
festival-within-the-festival this year. In Teatr K3’s …etectera… we were in
many senses watching a demonstration of technical prowess from recent graduates
of the Bialystok Puppet School. The premise was simple: three women, and about
twelve beautifully constructed, doughy puppets, strewn artfully within a
taped-off cube of stage littered with a few tables but otherwise a bare black
box. Drawn in from the audience the motives of the puppeteers, who first,
wide-eyed, discovered the space and its contents before ritualistically
choosing their first puppet (a supremely sinister collective pointing), soon
became clear. Bringing the figures, one by one, to detailed, if straightforward
life (each puppet would discover himself and then simply revel in his own
liveliness, his body and the space, running, jumping, dancing, falling in
love), the puppeteers soon shifted from facilitators to destroyers, conceiving
ever more brutal ways to kill the figures they had so artfully animated. The
puppetry on display, especially the bunraku-style tabletop work – a
display of marionetting was a little clumsier – was near faultless,
though the point of the piece was less in evidence. A strange ensemble dance
number in the puppets’ charnel house near the end seemed to suggest the women
were compelled to destroy their charges to take over the stage themselves but
this frame seemed tacked on and it was the manipulation itself that stole the
show. There was a certain brute satisfaction to be had in watching puppets
repetitively torn apart, slapped about, hung, tricked and tortured but
ultimately some less self-referential content (in this case the content was the
form, but in a rather loosely thought-through way) might have lifted us from
appreciation to genuine enjoyment.
Taking its title and inspiration from a shape-shifting
monster – of medieval German literature, via Borges’s Book of Imaginary
Beings – Kompania Doomsday’s Baldanders ostensibly showed us the
relationship between the caged trickster and his two-headed master, but also
dug deep into the identity and power relationships between puppet and
puppeteer. Marcin Bikowski, who directed as well as playing the monster,
produced a tour-de-force performance as a succession of grotesques, mainly
appearing as muppet-style mouth puppets sharing parts of his anatomy. Throughout,
he also played himself as their alter-ego, in tense and often violent
interaction – mocking, teasing, fighting, arguing, dancing – with
the puppet figures. The precision and sustained reality of the separation of
these symbiotic characters was masterful, and taken still further when a third
speaking character, a tiny worm-like puppet figure, was added to the mix.
We are used, in Britain, primarily to seeing
this form of lipsync puppetry used for light-entertainment figures, so an
unsettling dissonance was produced when it was used to bring us a
bloody-mouthed and bare-breasted woman who fought her operator for one of her
teeth, a boxful of riddling heads, or a terrifying hissing devil that
athletically stalked the walls of its cage. The text of the piece was somewhat
impenetrable and unsympathetically translated from Polish. There were layers of
metaphorical language and philosophical musings that sat uneasily with the
cascade of virtuoso puppetry, physicality and voice work, leaving watchers wondering
what profundity they were missing out on. For a Polish audience, the symbolism
of the power relationships and the allusive text perhaps speak to national
identity and history. But this was one to see for Bikowski’s outrageous
performance.
In Wiczy Theatre’s Broken Nails we were
treated to another rare display of performance, from the talented Anna Skubik
who managed not only to bring Marlene Dietrich to independent life whilst
wearing her as a full body puppet, but to create a vivid relationship between
this character and her own without compromising the reality of the figure. Deft
voice work, ventriloquism and physicality underpinned this strange symbiosis
which chose to tell an even stranger tale – of the (real? imagined?)
relationship between a slavish dresser and her charge, the fading star, a
relationship underpinned by aspiration, jealously, bitterness and
not-so-sublimated desire. The figure, when not abandoned to facilitate some
very tricky staging decisions, was highly evocative – the face beautifully
designed (though not flawless in construction). Again the material didn’t do
justice to the quality of the performance and puppetry, suffering from a patchy
translation and presupposing a lot of prior knowledge of Dietrich but the
moments when it flew, notably the songs, were extraordinary. The highlight for
me was a combative duet of Mein Herr in which both characters jockeyed for the
limelight whilst sitting provocatively on a chair – sharing of course
only one pair of legs.
| Far more crudely drawing on puppetry’s power
and control tropes was All Dressed Up To Go Dreaming, by Pope Joan Theatre
Company, playing in an atmospheric C-Soco basement. A dashingly-dressed
diplomat, back from a night at the opera, mused portentously on various erudite
cultural products to a suave soundtrack, before torturing, raping and
dismembering a life-size puppet woman. But there was little attempt to give the
puppet any life or identity, robbing the scene of much emotional meaning beyond
the unintentionally comic shock value of brutalising a doll. In the absence of
any significant puppetry logic, one wondered whether they’d intended to find a
woman to play the part, but been (unsurprisingly) unable to fill the role.
Weirder still, the whole piece was played without any contact at all with the
tiny, intimate audience – a very strange and disappointing dramatic
choice given that we’d been positioned almost as witnesses. |
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A battle for the body was likewise in
evidence in Nina Conti’s sell out stand-up Evolution, but here form married
content in much more satisfactory style. Having made her name in the
ventriloqual double act with her foul-mouthed puppet, Monkey, Conti doesn’t sit
back on her laurels (let’s face it, you could guarantee a decent Edinburgh
crowd on that intriguing gimmick alone) but continues to push her form.
Evolution develops the emphasis on the illusion of it all, always a
stock-in-trade of ventriloquism routines, here pushed to absurd new heights
such as a hypnosis routine where the puppet is struck, a mute Doctor Freud,
after hypnotising his operator. It’s all ardently self-aware, and a significant
proportion of the act is drawn from Monkey’s insistence that his puppeteer is
speaking for him, thinking for him; we’re referred to previous shows and reviews;
Conti’s celebrity father (Tom) makes a brief, memorable appearance but, as in
all good puppetry, this renders the truths of the show that much more loaded.
When Conti talks about feeding all her naughtier impulses through the puppet
character, whilst in conversation with him, the set up is rich in dramatic
irony and psychological tension. And the skills on display are also never
complacent - from the Russian doll effect of puppet operating puppet, through
some truly hilarious (prosthetic) breast puppetry to a mind boggling role
reversal whose secrets it would be unfair to give away here, this is
manipulation and ventriloquism of the highest order. This is not just a show
using puppetry, it is a show about puppetry and, for an audience well versed in
contemporary anti-illusion perhaps this is the most satisfying marriage of form
and content of them all?
Elsewhere, other classical puppetry skills were
put to the test. In a traditional storytelling context, Theatre of Widdershins
continued to sell out with old favourite Three Billy Goats Gruff, proving that
there’s still a real appetite for conventional puppetry expertly deployed on
the Fringe.
Puppet State returned triumphant with their
beautiful (and now, Total Theatre Award-winning) production, The Man Who
Planted Trees, in which a raucous glove-puppet dog effectively interrupts and
enrichens the classic tabletop telling of a contemporary fairytale with a host
of theatrical invention and evocative narrative – plus a contender for
the best ‘but I’m a puppet’ joke ever: I won’t spoil it, but those who’ve seen
the show will remember that it comes when the dog recalls a visit to the, er,
‘vegetarian’.
Shitty Deal Puppetry’s Complete Guide to the
Arts demonstrated that simple glove puppetry, albeit it with a good enough
gimmick and filthy enough jokes, can also pull an adult crowd. Classical
puppetry this was not, but the quick fire material is gagtastic and never have
so eclectic a crew of glove puppets, figurines, barbie dolls and muppets been
put through their slapstick paces so ruthlessly.
If your material is not quite funny enough to
stand up for itself, on the other hand, putting socks on either hand isn't
going to do much to help. Especially if that means every sketch is preceded by
a bit of faffing about with the socks' costumes behind your booth. Sadly, aside
from one or two good sock gags and a brave brief stab at Lear, The Return of
the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre had little to recommend it as either
comedy or puppetry.
Conversely, in the unconventional setting of
the Forest Fringe’s eclectic programme, the innovative styling of the Paper
Cinema’s take on shadow puppetry and paper play was the runaway success story
of this experimental venue. Combining the live with the cinematic by juxtaposing
hand-drawn with digital imagery, the homemade with the vividly photographic
opened up new dimensions of storytelling whilst employing some of the most
traditional of puppetry skills.
So there was much on offer at this year’s festival in terms of the
deployment of surprising and skilful puppetry-in-action. But what about the
content provided for this emerging host of puppet storytellers?
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Often, this proved problematic. For Les Enfants Terribles the
content of their story and its manner of delivery often seemed to emasculate
the vigour of its musical, visual form. Their successful show, The Terrible
Infants returned to Edinburgh after a triumphant run at last year’s festival
and was packing out the enormous Udderbelly Pasture when I attended. Underpinned
by skill and panache in the telling, it would have been easy to get swept along
by the high energy narratives (based on a series of Strudel Peter-style short
stories by Oliver Lansley and Sam Wyer, the playful, folksy live music. The
puppetry was skilful and inventive, with a pleasingly rough and simple style. I
particularly enjoyed the flock of bumble bees bouncing on the end of long
withys and the plays on scale with the boy who always wanted more to eat (whose
simple logic elicited cries of glee from the young audience). But too often the
content overpowered the form: this was a world of ‘stories’: a quaint fairytale
existence full of charming old ladies who seemed to have wandered out of pop-up
books and naughty children whose deeds were dastardly, but never dangerous:
tellingly we never did find out the most terrible lie of the chief storyteller,
the one that made the others gasp. There was simply no scope for it in this
world. And when the company moved out of this world, such as for the contemporary-looking
tabletop ‘hoodie’ who wanted only to disappear, the theatrical cracks started
to show. The fact is, it’s difficult to make ideas and feelings seem relevant
and true within a theatre of white clown faces, mannered alliterative rhyming
couplets and prancing physical theatre postures, and these characteristics
managed to make even the lively music and often interesting moments of puppetry
seem quaint. The young audience were mostly highly entertained by the sounds
and pictures, at least, if not the words, but for me this show served to
demonstrate the deliciously dangerous power of its antecedent Shockheaded Peter
by enacting its exact opposite. |
There are striking similarities between the problems suffered by
young company Gomito’s show, The Sun Dragon and Les Enfants Terribles’ work
although, interestingly, the theatrical invention of the former far exceeded
the well rehearsed, rather cloying slickness of the latter. The Sun Dragon
threw together object animation, large scale puppetry, fake snow, live magic
battles, smoke machines, fireflies, and of course a giant glowing-eyed dragon,
with an exuberant glee that did a lot to distract from the terribly twee
script. There is a real flair for visual storytelling in this young company’s
work, but they don’t yet seem entirely to trust it. Their audience was
captivated by moments of joyous object animation (when five plantpots became a
very expressive ‘small time travelling robot’ who could stack himself into a
neat pile when under attack) and by the wonderful large-scale figures they had
created, including a luminous star-studded sage. And there was genuine
theatrical bravura in many of the effects the five-strong company created,
exposed on their thrust stage: from using a giant fan to create a head wind for
flying, to manhandling lights to create a solar eclipse, a battle of spells, a
single, touchable, star. This is wonderfully theatrical stuff with the puppetry
well integrated to a language of things and rough-yet-magical transformation
which characterised their dramaturgy. Only the story wanted a serious rethink,
suffering from serious tell-as-we-show syndrome and often both derivative
(there were overtones of both Harry Potter and Labyrinth) and patronising
(children don’t want to be told how full of promise they are, as a race). Often
it simply felt over-complicated and redundant – there’s no need to
overwrite a plot full of poignance and awe and wonder – with material of
this kind you can leave that to the audience and we’ll bring it for you.
Gomito’s second show in Edinburgh this year, Before We Remember,
was at the Bedlam theatre which, just as last year, provided a good home and a
loyal audience for puppet-related shows. This work-rate clearly suits the
company, as none of Gomito’s performers look nearly old enough to have had ten
shows at the Fringe... Before We Remember, still (we were told) in development,
had the appealing premise of examining the memories flashing through the mind
of a century-old woman in the second before her death. She told us at the
outset that she couldn’t recall anything that happened to her before she was 92
– or was it just that there were things she didn’t want to remember?
Either way, there’s quite of lot of detective work to do. This the relentlessly
cheerful and charming cast set to with gusto. To begin with, they turned over
Bedlam’s black box space by climbing up the walls, and then they dissected it
with rope, forming landscapes, environments, spiderwebs and tightropes. They
uncovered photographs, re-enacted with witty running commentary, and coaxed
greatness from a collection of bin-bags – most memorably a whole ocean,
an animated dog, and the tapping sound of rain. At the climax, a shower of old
letters fell sympathetically from above. Problems came again in the character
and storyline. The centenarian protagonist, Kate Carter, was a strange
creation, rather like a teenager’s version of old age. It’s telling that when
the cast tracked her life by pegging post-it notes of significant moments on
the string timeline, the gleeful and fully-imagined childhood memories gave way
to rather clichéd depictions of later life. A moment of love and loss became a
simple romantic touchstone, when surely in such a long life it could have had a
more sophisticated and satisfying aftermath – we’re not told about much
that Kate actually did besides loving and regretting. The texture of the times
she lived through seemed slight, although snatches could be sweet, as with the
seventies spacehoppers (the bags again) and the ‘loud’ eighties. Ultimately the
piece was slightly smothered by its saccharine and twee tendencies, and too
often music was used as emotional shorthand. I’d like to see more struggle (the
rage and frustration that every life contains at times) and more truthful
detail in the development. When this show is back, in 2009, it ought to be a
winner.
Sometimes
the unconscious echoes of content resonated so as to suggest underlying
puppetry themes. Puppets are always about life and death – this year the
death was paternal, and repeated...
Pangolin’s Teatime completely transformed their performance
space for their show The Last Yak, making the large Pleasance Kingdome intimate
by seating the audience on stage in the round, enclosed by screens of white
muslin, from behind which much of the action emerged. It was bold and effective
staging. The plot was equally brave, inventing a creation myth and stretching
it all the way to the death of its god-figure, and paralleling this with
another storyline about a feral child discovered by siblings mourning their a
recently dead father. So far, so Freudian, but there was also a political fable
with a jungleful of animals trying to convene a governing committee, and a
false idol in the form of a fake yak. Bringing us these riches was a large cast
and a profusion of different puppetry, from satisfyingly simple shadow-puppet
storytelling, to bunraku-style figures (the effective foundling), a huge yak
head, a pair of bears on wheeled stools, a bounding tiger attached to its
operator, and more. Everything was beautifully made, but could have benefited
from some more attention to performance details. There was just too much for
the piece to hold – the story seemed to lose the courage of its initial
conviction, get a bit lost and then end with a bump, and few of the design and
production choices were fully explored. But if Pangolin could decide what they
most want to do, they could probably do it well.
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There is another dead father in Lilly Through The Dark, the
second production of the River People after last year’s well-received The
Ordinaries, and again at Bedlam. Lilly, after her father’s death, travelled to
reclaim him from a grotesque, surreal purgatory. Visually the show was both
striking and coherent – although the River People must be confident that
Tim Burton isn’t overly litigious – and the simple accompaniment of live
mandolin was in keeping with the handmade aesthetic. The coherence and
precision of the ensemble performance was a joy that carried us through the
dark story. There were some pleasing puppetry choices, including the crude
newspaper figure of the dead father, and a pair of hanged men – a
highlight – with human heads on puppet bodies, bantering away from beyond
the grave. At heart though, I didn’t feel a strong enough logic for Lilly, the
protagonist, as a puppet, and this wasn’t helped by a vacancy in her as a
character: she faced awkwardness and difficulty in her journey, but never a
real moral challenge, nor a convincing danger – her supposed nemesis, the
villain Rotten Pockets, wasn’t defeated but meekly melted into an agreeable
helper. And rather like the Lost Spectacles and Terrible Infants, the
human-performer characters in Lilly seemed hampered rather than helped by the
earnestly mannered physicality and vocal tics of their performances. There was
much that was powerfully theatrical here – and some nuggets of truth
about grief, when Lilly spoke to and finally relinquished her father, accepting
that she will not perfectly recall him – but it could be more affecting
with a stronger, simpler, story and less aesthetic contrivance. |
We met yet more dead parents in Little Bulb Theatre’s Total
Theatre Award- and Fringe First-winning show Crocosmia. Both of them, this
time: the three Brackenberg children’s mother and father are killed – we
are gently and manner-of-factly told, and all the more brutally for it –
in a car crash. The greatest achievements here are the accurate recreation of
the range of childhood responses to grief, and the wonderfully open
storytelling, with a great mess of objects (including a chewed-carrot goldfish
and music from an on-stage record player), and merry swapping of characters and
costumes. At one point, the children perform memories of their parents in the
‘Brackenberg Battenberg Theatre’, while gleefully eating the cake ‘puppets’.
When, at the end of the show, we all blew up balloons for little Freya’s eighth
birthday party, and her tiny lightbulb sprouted and grew, there can have been
few dry eyes about. This was a show where rough puppetry, cleverly deployed,
worked perfectly.
But some shows need their puppetry to work more sophisticatedly.
In The Empty Space’s deeply touching Heartbreak Soup, Laura Lindow’s story
– more complex than it initially seemed – of a boy and his heart
transplant donor, the magic of the telling is led by objects from hospital bed
draws, tiny lights, and monsters from the bedsheets – used to stage a
memorable battle with the ‘Great Aorta’. The boys themselves are Cuddy, ‘the
blue boy’ (very sweetly played by Scott Turnbull), who has a congenital heart
defect and is, at age 11, waiting for an imminent second transplant; and Dan
(Chris Price), ‘the pink boy’, who at 12 is slightly more knowing and
experienced but has died, we discover, in an accident. At points the two are
played by puppets as well, Cuddy as a soft doll-like figure and Dan as a
beautiful creation of simply folded pink blanket. There is room for the clarity
and expressiveness of these puppets to be heightened – which parts and
points of the boys’ lives do they represent? – which might be used to
bring more detail of the story into the present and lessen the need for a tiny
bit too much explication at the end.
| At
this year’s festival there was puppetry abounding, with many different forms
and functions. And if too often its use was marred by being out of balance with
the other elements of a production, it was almost always ambitious and beyond
the frequently tokenistic use of puppetry of recent years. It is clear that
making puppetry work theatrically needs, primarily, a return to the simplest
understanding of drama – the interaction of form with content, of
storytelling with style, of communication with spectacle. But the festival, for
puppetry, was peppered with myriad moments of brilliance and a truly inspiring
array of young and older artists engaging with the possibilities of the form.
The right questions are being asked. |
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