Liar liar

"His arms look all wrong!"

"Hmmm, he doesn't have much flex in his elbows, does he?"

"You can't hold him by his crotch."

They sound a bit like drunk surgeons about to perform an operation, but the people talking are actors, and their patient is made out of wood, plastic foam, and papier-mâché. The puppet's retractable nose hasn't been plugged in yet, so there's an unsettling hole in the middle of its face, but come August it is going to be Pinocchio.  

When I drop in on them in London's Rose Bruford College, where they occupy a quiet rehearsal room with trees pressing against the huge windows behind a half-built set, Pants on Fire are working on a scene which starts with Pinocchio being hurled into the sea.

The sequence will last maybe 30 seconds, but I watch them work on it for the best part of an hour. It's slow progress because there's a lot to get right. Before his fall, Pinocchio has to brace himself desperately against a window frame (without knocking over the array of flats which comprise the set) as his owner tries to push him out. There must be a convincing slow-motion tumble, with the flats tilting vertiginously back to show the clifftop falling away; then, after hitting the sea, Pinocchio has to hang in the water for a moment before kicking himself to the surface and easing into a leisurely breast-stroke. 

The four-foot-tall puppet that has to perform all this doesn't dangle from wires like a marionette. Pinocchio has to be manhandled at all times by a crew of shadowy handlers like, I'm told, the puppets in Japanese Bunraku theatre. They must animate the character's movement around the stage without getting in each other's way, kicking over the set, or distracting the audience. To complicate things a bit more, they also appear as the play's human characters, meaning the cast have to tag in and out of Pinocchio-steering duty throughout the show.  

"It has to be very tightly choreographed with so many people around him," says Peter Bramley, one of Pants on Fire's artistic directors and a teacher at Rose Bruford. "We're still getting to know the puppet, how he works, how to get specific movements into him." 

This requires paying close attention to how Pinocchio's weight is distributed and the best places to hold him – but it also means the actors have to look at familiar motions with a new eye. 

"There's a moment of weightlessness," declares Ben Chamberlain, who plays Pinocchio in his human incarnation, standing on his tip-toes with his arms spread out. He's trying to capture the feeling you get after plunging into water, just before you start to rise. 

Coordinating Pinocchio's breast-stroke—a complicated task which calls for a handler on either arm and another to flex the puppet's hinged wooden feet—has to wait as the cast discover that they can't agree on how breast-stroke actually works. Does the kick come first, or is it the arms? 

The drama school's students are all on holiday, but as a roomful of young actors drop to the floor to recreate the motions of a swimmer, I feel a bit like an Ofsted inspector. 

Pants on Fire, who won a Best of Edinburgh award in 2010 for a recasting of Ovid's Metamorphoses set during World War Two, have moved on a decade for their take on Carlo Collodi's 1883 children's story of a marionette that comes to life. Their Pinocchio will have the feel of B-movie horror. The 10-foot-tall puppet built for the role of the Talking Cricket looks more like a visitor from outer space than an insect; the puppeteers' faces will be obscured by trilby hats tilted down over their eyes; the action will be broken up by commercial breaks for consumer products that never existed.  

"When I was adapting the script I knew I wanted to bring out something that was darker than many versions of Pinocchio," says Bramley, who goes on to list—with considerable relish—elements of the story that scared him as a child but never made it into the Disney movie. 

"As soon as Pinocchio has his feet made they get burned off. The fox and the cat hang him from a tree. And he throws a hammer at the cricket and squashes it – only then it comes back as a ghost."

Relating Pinocchio as a horror film allows Pants on Fire to tap into the darker parts of the story. Turning it into a 1950s horror film gave them a visual language to play around with: old-school monsters, saucy costumes and black-and-white TV shows (lengthy stretches of the show will play out in monochrome, enlivened by rare moments of garish colour). 

Sorting all that out has to wait. The puppets are finished (Pinocchio's tell-tale proboscis an exception) but the cast are still hard at work building props and deciding on costumes. Although their last Fringe show was a hit, funds are too tight to let them outsource much of the preparation for the follow-up.

Right now, though, the focus is on teaching Pinocchio to swim. 

"The less you do, the more mesmerising it is," says Mabel Jones, Pants on Fire's other director and the company's puppetry guru, as she instructs the crew of actors piloting Pinocchio around the rehearsal room. "A simple gesture can tell so much more than lots of frenetic movements."

It's a laboured process, three people trying to coordinate a single puppet's movements, and for a while it's difficult to see how it could possibly work. It's hard to say what it is that changes when the puppeteers finally find the magic combination of movements, but when they do the effect is instantaneous. Pinocchio snaps into focus, kicking himself through the water, and for a moment his handlers seem to disappear.