Monstrous ambition

“I just slightly despair,” says Toby Mitchell, writer and performer of new one-man puppetry show Monsters Got Talent, “that kids are watching this and thinking it’s their route to success and fame, when it only really happens to one in a million or so.” He’s talking of course of the Britain’s Got Talent / Pop Idol / X Factor phenomenon, exceptionally popular among children and young people, that’s dominated the television schedules for the last few years.

Monsters Got Talent follows a young monster called Glurk, whose parents enter him for a TV talent show. “He’s a great singer, but he gets nervous singing in public,” says Mitchell. The tension of wondering whether or not he’ll succeed is twinned with some gentle questioning of “what the performers [on these shows] are actually going through,” and whether it is really the best way to get into performing.

“The reality is a lot more hard work and generally quite a lot of luck one way or the other,” he points out, so these shows are mostly “for the benefit of the TV companies and not for the benefit of the people in them. Having said that, this all sounds terribly serious - it’s going to be a fun, silly show.”

Mitchell has quite some pedigree in producing “fun, silly” shows for family audiences. A co-founder of the Tall Stories theatre company, which has been steadily turning out mostly child-friendly pieces for over a decade at the Fringe, Mitchell is an old hand at getting the balance right between good storytelling and gentle moralising. He mostly wants children to have “a good, silly 45 minutes,” he says, and “if there are occasional points to be made, they should come out of the story.”

Mitchell talks with great enthusiasm about his influences: he loves Pixar for making stories with universal, age-diverse appeal; and for this show in particular, he follows the mighty Muppet Show. “I have a photo of me as a child with the genuine Kermit,” he says, from a visit to the old set in Elstree, Hertfordshire, before US networks put their faith into the project and gave them space to film at home. “I just love them for their pure silliness and invention and the fact that they’ll sometimes spend, I think, two days filming one five-minute sketch.”

Mitchell’s approach to puppetry is more ‘relaxed’ - he will have the puppets out on stage with him and won’t be attempting “classical ventriloquism.” Instead, “there’s a way of focussing on the puppet when it’s talking so people hopefully don’t look at my mouth.” This is partly because throwing your voice is “a tricky thing to get right,” and partly down to preference. “I tend to think that ventriloquism can actually be more distracting than the idea of just playing with the puppet itself,” he says, and he suggests that he likes to pull back the curtain on his method a little more openly.

As well as Glurk, there will be a whole host of “slightly ‘loser’ puppets,” says Mitchell, whose failures will be paraded entertainingly in typical talent show style. In a slight concession to what Mitchell calls “the Shrek approach” to children’s entertainment, where some jokes are deliberately thrown over the heads of children to their accompanying adults, these puppets “may well have the names of certain politicians or famous people, who it will be quite fun to put into a bin, quite frankly.”

Mitchell likes to keep his method a little bit improvised (“that’s part of the adventure”), so there will be an element of uncertainty as to the outcome of the show. “The audience will genuinely choose who they want to go through to the finals,” he says, though he admits there will be some Simon Cowell-style manipulation of this, with him ultimately acting as the “judge.” But even Glurk's eventual triumph is not assured.

“The possibility is very definitely there... that he will fail,” says Mitchell, and the outcome might even change from night to night. This unpredictability even makes the show slightly nerve-wracking for Mitchell himself: “If I got scared, I would be scared.” But ultimately, it’s part of his subtly subversive approach to children’s storytelling and the moral of his tale. “It shouldn’t always be triumph over adversity,” he insists. “Sometimes, it should be ‘no, this person wasn’t meant to be on the stage.’”