Masters of Puppets

There’s nothing new about puppetry that explores dark, even adult, themes. After all it’s several centuries since Punch and Judy first sprung up on beachfronts around the country, telling twisted tales of a wife-beating murderer.

But it can’t pass unnoticed that a handful of the most highly rated productions at this year’s Fringe have put puppetry at the heart of their productions. Boris and Sergey's Vaudevillian Adventure from Flabbergast Theatre and Les Enfants Terrible's The Trench have earned wide acclaim and growing attention for their vivid, unpredictable approach to the art of puppetry. Somehow, the darkness at the heart of these productions is amplified; the inanimate object suddenly animated, given ridiculous, unnatural life... And while the puppeteer may be in control, the puppet always draws our focus.

"A big wave was probably started by Michael Morpurgo's War Horse, where the horses were designed by the Handspring Puppet Company," says Oliver Lansley, the writer of The Trench. "In terms of renewed interest in puppetry, it showed mainstream audiences the range of what it could achieve. Another great example was Blind Summit's The Table at last year's Fringe. People are becoming more open to how puppetry can be used and how it can compliment the play.”

The Trench is, as Lansley describes it, "stupidly ambitious" – a mixture of human performance, puppetry techniques, detailed and fantastical staging, and somber, soulful live music from singer-composer Alexander Wolfe. Inspired by the true story of a group of miners trapped by a cave-in during the First World War, The Trench plays out in spoken verse and, as it steadily assumes an atmosphere that Lansley compares to Greek mythology and Lewis Carroll, the hellish reality of war shifts and melds with otherworldly fantasy.

Indeed, to Lansley, there is no necessary juxtaposition between the dark, adult themes of The Trench and the use of puppetry. “Having a puppet in the show need not make it a 'puppet show.' And for performers, as a skill it’s not as terrifying and distant as it may seem. You just get your hands on it and make it work.”

While The Trench uses gothic puppetry to supplement a brutally dark story of industrial slaughter on the battlefields of France, Boris and Sergey’s Vaudevillian Adventure is a bit more jaunty. Boris and Sergey, two Eastern European con artists in the form of foot-high bunraku puppets, host an intimate evening of cabaret and imaginative cursing that confounds expectations and never ceases to escalate in darkness and absurdity.

What is most striking, however, about Boris and Sergey is its profound aesthetic beauty and the extent to which one’s disbelief is utterly suspended. Despite the fact that the puppets are tiny, dwarfed by their controllers, they command your full attention. They are as real as any human character is. "The audience completely buy into the puppets and ignore the puppeteers," says Henry Maynard, the show's artistic director as well as one of the lead puppeteers. "There's a Brechtian element where we remind people that they're watching puppets on stage, that it's not real. Some people have walked in with certain preconceptions about what puppetry is..." he smiles mischievously, before continuing. "Which we don't necessarily deliver on."

But making this work requires great skill. Each puppet is operated by three puppeteers, which means the cast have to act in perfect sync; a tough challenge for a performance that requires the eponymous brothers to play poker, kung fu fight, perform pyrotechnic acrobatics and dance eerily to the Kate Bush. As Elaine Hartley, who controls Sergey's legs, explains: "If the head puppeteer takes an intake of breath, that's our cue for 'running' or 'jumping.' All the puppeteers breath together, so when Boris and Sergey start running we all have the same rhythm and pace."

Building this level of skill required a grueling crash-course in puppetry. “When we set out to do this, we did four weeks rehearsal, and the first week was pure puppeteering," says Maynard.

While justly proud of the puppetry on display, Maynard points more to the burgeoning cabaret revival, with its tendency towards the gothic and the outrageous, to explain Boris and Sergey's success. This influence is clearly seen in much of the manic, freewheeling improvisation that completes the performance, ad-libbing freely and bantering profanely with the crowd. 

“Usually, the first thing that comes to mind, no matter how dirty or inappropriate, will be the most entertaining. With improvisation, the characters evolve and become incredibly complex. Boris and Sergey have a twisted, love-hate co-dependency, which is classic double-act clowning, but is built up over time."

It probably helps that, despite the incredible technical proficiency that the cast displays, most of Flabbergast Theatre initially trained in acting and comedy rather than puppetry. "You need a lot of empathy to channel something through another object," Maynard says.

If Boris and Sergey is all about the puppetry, the careful honing of a craft until the characters come alive and interact with an audience, in The Trench the puppets are very much folded into the staging and the narrative. Lansley acknowledges that: "sometimes, Fringe theatre is understandably afraid of elaborate staging. To use this amount of props, puppets and effects in this amount of time is pretty epic, but it can be done.

“The Fringe is such a great place for experimentation, so I would always encourage people to be as ambitious as they can - though venue staff might not agree with me!" he laughs. "It's ridiculous and exhausting, but it's a nice change from two chairs on a bare stage."