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Nature and Supernature: British Large-scale Marionettes

Gareth K Vile

Bedknobs and Broomsticks, The Ocean at the End of the Lane and Warhorse all speak to a specific British strategy for puppetry. These are successful touring productions that contain a strong puppetry presence, to the extent that the puppets, in two of the productions, could be considered the leading characters. The puppets are operated by multiple puppeteers and play on the spectacular size of the marionette. But perhaps most importantly, they often use the puppet to represent an animal or a supernatural creature. Together, they express the inhuman through the inanimate.

Warhorse’s title character is the puppet horse, allowing the production to have a sense of a horse’s bulk and presence: the antagonist of Ocean is initially presented as a series of flailing limbs, a ghostly monstrous entity that is both physically threatening and uncomfortably ethereal. While it is possible to comment on how the earliest use of puppets has been discovered in primitive rituals, and that the very material of the puppet insists on a reanimation of the dead, this modern puppetry is far more clinical and less concerned with the materiality of its component parts. Nevertheless, the deceptive animation of these creations, always impressive and a feature of a theatrical ‘magic’, does speak to the existential ambiguity of the puppet, an object which appears to be alive without any vitality within itself.

In all of these cases, the puppetry is highly skilled and more than a mere technique: it forms much of the foundation of the performance and articulates a form of magic-realism. The challenges of depicting nature on stage – naturalism will also find a horse or demon impossible to stage – is resolved as the production engages in a theatricality which locates the puppet within its natural environment, whether through the ascetic lighting of Ocean, Bedknobs’ primary coloured scenography. There is a dramaturgy that is infected by the presence of the puppet, that embraces theatre’s artificiality and depicts a world in which the boundaries between the animate and inanimate are crossed and cancelled.

The puppet now appears as a guest in what could be seen as a style first imagined by Emma Rice, a version of total theatre that loves to combine music and song, choreography and script to either adapt classic texts, or reinvigorate Shakespeare. Using a scenography that relates to Brecht’s artificial and versatile settings, these productions often throw in a puppet playing a dog, or a child (the former to the point of cliché, the latter for a brief scene but rarely to a major character). The puppet is comfortable here due to the sparse refusal of the suspension of disbelief, the self-conscious staging of a production as play. This has a family resemblance to the marionettes of Warhorse et al, but reduced the puppet to an intrusion, a punch-line, a novelty.

Yet both approaches are ingrained in a commercially successful theatre and, in the case of the former, are part of their appeal and individuality. It provokes the question of whether puppetry could sustain a popular show in itself – the cast replaced by invisible puppeteers, the actor now a technician… and if so, what traditions would collaborate with British commercial theatre.