Masters of puppets

There was a time when the popular idea of puppetry was of a tacky sea-side side-show, forever associated with a gaggle of crying five year-olds forced to watch Punch and Judy at a wet village fête. But the past decade has seen a seismic change in the artform’s mainstream credence, with puppetry shows now taking centre stage in the West End and on Broadway, and scooping countless awards from prestigious industry gongs to the top prize in Britain’s biggest televised talent show.

Putting a contemporary spin on an artform that has been a stalwart of live theatre for thousands of years has made puppetry a hot ticket once again at this year’s Fringe, where a wealth of new and returning acts are blending artistic mediums in a bid to make their work more visceral and engaging than ever.

Prior to the current boom, puppets undeniably enjoyed a certain small-screen golden age. Be they nappy-toting Orville, vulpine sophisticate Basil Brush or silent magician Sooty, a hand was never far from the innards of a toy animal on mid-twentieth century children's TV. And smashing this stereotype has been key to propelling puppetry into the more refined theatrical reaches it occupies today. “Puppets appeal to a childlike, innocent part in every person: the artform is universal, profound and deeply human. And I think it is even more delightful as an adult, as we aren’t invited as often to play,” muses Weeping Spoon’s Tim Watts, who returns to the Fringe this year with 2011 hit, The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer – a glorious piece of solo storytelling about a man (embodied literally by Watts' hand) searching for his lost love in an underwater dystopia.

"People have been plugging away for years, working dedicatedly in puppetry, wanting to raise its profile and show that it wasn’t just for children," adds The Wrong Crowd’s Hannah Mulder, "and that it could be a vital, complex, interesting part of theatre-making."

The Wrong Crowd's efforts are paying off: a sell-out run of the mist-strewn, mythical tale, The Girl with the Iron Claws (complete with hand-held marionettes, shadow puppetry and a giant omnipresent bear) garnered a Fest five-star review at the Fringe 2011. This year, they dip further into the well of Slavic folklore with Hag, about the "extraordinary hag-witch character, Baba Yaga," whose tale permeates the cultural history of Indo-Europe.

As a rising number of companies and shows have started to integrate puppetry into their performances, the medium has begun a well-documented departure from the niche. No longer a solitary performance art, it is now accompanied by a raft of other theatrical devices: from videography and 'perspective shifts', such as those seen in The Paper Cinema’s lauded retelling of Homer's The Odyssey, to the exquisitely human-puppet fusioneering and object animation in Perth Theatre Company's It’s Dark Outside, another slice of heartstring-tugging storytelling from the team behind Alvin Sputnik. This dialogue between different forms has renewed the meaning of live puppetry and its elevated status has been welcomed.

"I’m quite amazed at how puppetry has risen in popularity – it’s quite beautiful to see," says Nic Rawling of The Paper Cinema. "Puppetry is an innate concept: the notion that something can be manipulated to express an idea is always going to continue. Take blokes trying to explain the offside rule using salt and pepper shakers: that is a form of manipulation and puppetry – and there is always going to be a need for people to make renderings of the world in paints, pigments and pens." 

Digitisation, CGI, 3D films and cartoons may have appeared to all but eradicate the need for puppets some years ago, but Rawling believes that this, in fact, is what has led to the artform’s resurgence. "When we first started, there was a kind of backlash against digital artforms and a call for hand-crafted puppets and illustrations. There seems to be a lot of love around craft and craft-making, and sometimes larger mediums like big films and music can be overproduced. I think there’s a kind of human need for something handmade."

And Mulder agrees, adding: "After the digital and technological revolution, which theatre-makers investigated so passionately for decades, there might now be a hunger to rediscover a more tangible form of theatre, like puppetry, which requires the audience’s direct imaginative engagement.

"As an audience member, you are the one actively involved in animating that object, by being willing to believe that it is alive. I think we’re all really hungry for suspension of disbelief and puppetry is one of the elements of theatre which most demands that."