Category Archives: Humanettes

A Whole lot of puppet stuff!!! Pt.2 of 2 – Wolds Words, Central School of Speech & Drama & primary puppets in Middlesbrough

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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Apologies for the huge delay on the second installation of “puppet stuff!!!” avid puppetlady readers:

On Saturday 24th of October Tim Austin (my Rough Magic Theatre co-performer and husband) were invited to perform our “Alice in Wonderland” show for the “Wolds Words” festival in the library building in Louth, Lincolnshire.  On the following Wednesday, Thursday and Friday I was due to teach the First Year puppetry students at Royal Central School of speech and drama and the Monday following that I was due to work in a primary school in Middlesbrough making hand and string puppets.

The performance space for “Alice” was upstairs but we had lots of help getting all our props and costumes up to the room from Angela Reynolds (the lady who booked us from Magna Vitae) and her young daughter.  It was a modestly sized but very appreciative audience, all of whom were very reluctant to leave at the end of the show!  We invited them to ask us questions and to see any of the puppets they were interested in more closely which they seemed to enjoy immensely before they left.

So after packing up and eating a well earned meal we went to Norfolk to visit Tim’s relations (which is not too far from Louth) and planned to go on from there to London on the following Tuesday.

I had made contact with Nenagh Watson through Facebook earlier in the year when we had a chat about how my suitcase shadow theatre worked as she was interested in making something similar herself.  She expressed interest in my coming to work with the students at “Central” (I shall use this as a shortened form of “Royal Central School of Speech and Drama” for the rest of the post) but I explained that as I live such a long way from London that if I ever came to work with the students it would ideally need to be a block of work rather than the odd day here and there.  It wasn’t possible to book this in at the time that we spoke about it but Nenagh thought she could probably arrange something later on in the year.  In the meantime she asked me to make a suitcase theatre for her which she used to create a little show for her wedding.  CLICK HERE to see my previous post on the making of this suitcase.

Then when I enquired about doing some work at Central a bit later in the year Nenagh managed to arrange for me to do a block of 3 days with the first year puppetry students.  This also coincided with the “Suspense” puppet festival organised by Little Angel Theatre.  This is a festival that we have never attended previously as we do not produce theatre specifically for adults ourselves and because London is a bit out of the way just for a pleasure jaunt.  Nenagh also kindly arranged for us to stay with a friend of hers who lives in London and we came in a day early (Tuesday) to get settled.  This also allowed us to attend a Devoted & Disgruntled event on the Tuesday evening that was hosted by the Little Angel as part of the Suspense festival.  The discussion question was “Puppetry – Shackled by the Past?”.  If you do not know what a devoted and disgruntled event is CLICK HERE to see more information about these events which are run by “Improbable Theatre Company”.  It was a great event and there were lots of interesting discussions and I was able to meet not only Nenagh herself and some of the students I’d be working with but also several puppeteers who I had only met through social media before, such as Sian Kidd and Penny Francis.

Sian was performing Mirth & Misery’s “Death Puppet Klezma Jam” show as part of the festival but unfortunately this was not on while we were there.  While we were down in London, apart from the D&D event, we managed to see “Ubu & the Truth Commission” by Handspring Puppet Company (of Warhorse fame) and also the official “Suspense” opening event which had lots of time for chatting, munching and mingling and a puppet cabaret which included some snippets of upcoming shows in the festival.  We got to meet Aya Nakamura again, (of whom I am a huge fan) and also her co-performer Mohsen Nouri from Rouge 28 Theatre who I had not met before.  They performed their Mademoiselle Lychee humanette striptease act which I hadn’t seen before either.

For the workshops with the first year puppetry students from Central, I performed both of my Shadow Puppet Suitcase shows for them, (“Edward Lear’s Nonsense” and “Jabberwocky!“) for inspiration and Nenagh also brought the suitcase theatre that I had made for her to show the students and she also showed us the puppets and techniques that she had used for the special puppet show that she’d created for her wedding.  She had used some 3-D shadow puppetry using a scene made out of wire and acetate and did a starry night scene using card with pin-pricks and a torch which was very effective and also did some shadows outside of the suitcase using a white shirt and a light with red heart attached to it, (it’s a bit difficult to describe but the technique showed a glowing red heart through the shirt).

Having had all that inspiration the students had the rest of the three days to create their own short shadow puppet performance which they would perform with the suitcase theatre.  Jemima and Freddy both chose nonsense poems as inspiration and Jo picked a short poem by Robert Louis Stevenson from a book I’d brought to give them ideas, while Seb decided to make a shadow puppet play out of an environmentally themed piece that he had written previously.  They all did excellent work and performed their shows for some of the other students on the Friday, (all of whom seemed very impressed and well entertained).  All of the students helped each other to perform their shows rather than choosing to create shows where they were being entirely self-sufficient.  This gave them greater scope for creativity, more challenging lighting and sound effects.  You can see photo’s of their work below:

Work by Jemima Hand – Jemima created a performance based on “On The Ning Nang Nong” nonsense poem by Spike Milligan

Work by Frederica Hayes – Frederica created a performance based on a short section of “The Hunting of the Snark” by Lewis Carroll (“Fit the Seventh – The Banker’s Fate”)

Work by Sebastian Mayer – Sebastian created a performance based on an environmentally themed story that he had written previously.

Work by Joanna Wheele – Joanna created a performance based on the poem “Windy Nights” by Robert Louis Stevenson

When I finally got up to our base in North Yorkshire I had to make the journey to Middlesbrough for my primary school workshop through all of the very foggy weather we had at the time.  An early start at quarter to five ensured that I reached the school in good time but unfortunately my sat-nav took me on the worst possible route back again through the Yorkshire Dales, (which can be misty at the best of times).  Luckily I got back in one piece but it was very low visibility and made for hairy driving conditions!  I did hand and string puppet making using the same technique that I had used previously at a school in Bridlington (CLICK HERE for pictures and more details).  I wasn’t able to take any pictures at the Middlesbrough school unfortunately.

I have crammed an awful lot into this one post so if anyone wants to ask for more information about anything I have written then please ask 🙂

“The Hobbit” versus “The Tinderbox” at Norwich Puppet Theatre

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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My husband and I have been going down to Norfolk regularly for a good many years to visit his family, (who live in the Kings Lynn area).  In all these years we have never got around to seeing a production at the Norwich Puppet Theatre.

So this Christmas we decided to treat ourselves to a trip to Norwich and went to see “The Hobbit” at the cinema, (with the special frame rate) and “The Tinderbox” at Norwich Puppet Theatre on the same day.  I had visited the theatre before to audition for their “Little Red Riding Hood” show but it was quite different being an audience member.

We struggled through horrendous traffic to see “The Hobbit” first, (the puppet show was in the evening).  We arrived just in time to get something to eat and then went in to see the film.

I am very hard to please when it comes to adaptations of books I like.  I always spot any deviations from the plot right away as I have an extremely good memory, (it comes in useful for learning scripts).  I thought Peter Jackson did a fantastic job with the Lord of the Rings so I was hoping I’d be equally pleased with The Hobbit.

I was very pleased that the songs had been kept in, and the humourous scene with the dwarves throwing Bilbo’s crockery about was better than I’d imagined.

I had heard that Barry Humpreys was to be the Goblin King and he was also brilliant and just as I had imagined in the book.  Good also were the classic riddling scene with Gollum and the adventure with the trolls.

However at various points, (including the episode with the trolls) Bilbo was made into a cleverer and more heroic figure than he is in the book.  This seemed to have been done so that the dwarves would gain some confidence in Bilbo by the end of the film and the audience would want to see the second film because the main character has been revealed to be a hero and not just a wimp who wants to go home all the time.  In the book the growth of Bilbo’s confidence and heroism is much slower and half the charm is Bilbo’s ordinariness as he stands in for the person reading the book.  In real life most people would prefer tea and cake to being in danger of death and so it is with Bilbo.

I had also been looking forward to seeing my childhood’s Dr. Who, Sylvester McCoy, in the role of Radagast the Brown.  I tried my hardest to like it, but his performance was out of step with the rest of the film.  He seemed to be in a children’s movie and the rest was like Lord of the Rings – very adult in tone and with lots of violence and excessive amounts of gore.  Don’t get me wrong, gore is okay in Lord of the Rings, but The Hobbit is a children’s book and I wanted a child friendly film to match.  I think Sylvester’s performance suffered from having to interact with too many CGI effects.  The hedgehogs, rabbits and even his house were not at all convincing and I struggled to get a sense of the danger of the Necromancer from a CGI hedgehog behaving very unnaturally, to say nothing of the giant bunny rabbits.  A bit more gravitas in McCoy’s manner and using real hedgehogs would have been better in my view.  I think the Wargs should have been more like real wolves instead of turning them into weird deformed looking creatures too, they are described merely as giant wolves in the book.

I did not remember a great deal about the story of The Tinderbox so came to the show fairly fresh.  The one thing I did remember was the three dogs with the enormous eyes.  I was very taken with the illustrations of them I had seen in a book of the story when I was younger.  I thought they had an uncanny and rather alarming appearance which gave me a pleasurable thrill of excitement when I was reading it.

The puppets were very visually appealing and a world away from the Hobbit’s CGI.  The puppet used carved wood, old kitchen implements and other found objects such as the flint that created the witch’s head.  The techniques used in the show were all very slick and professional, though there were one or two little things that didn’t work as well as they could have done such as a shadow that was being cast onto a black animated backdrop showing a ferris wheel.  There was a point near the beginning where the turntable stage’s movement was not very obvious because it did not have any “landmarks” on it as well.  It would have worked better if it had stripes of different colours painted onto it perhaps.

They used two performers who passed the puppets back and forth between them and even had both performers voice the same characters at different points in the show.  I think this would have worked better if they merely swapped operators but kept the same voice actor for each character for better continuity.  On the other hand the parts where both performers voiced the witch at the same time gave an uncanny doubling, echoing effect which was quite a nice idea.

I think both myself and my husband Tim’s favourite characters were the King and Queen humanettes.  They charmingly referred to each other as “Mr. Queen” and “Mrs. King” some of the lines they came out with were priceless, such as when they threatened to turn the soldier into a teddy bear and hug him to death as a punishment.  Seonaid Goody’s high pitched voice and spoilt rotten, child like nastiness were fantastic and her constant refrains of “eugh yucky!” filled me with glee.  It was quite interesting that the King & Queen and the pursuit of wealth and materialism were the real villains of the story rather than the witch.  It seemed that the witch’s goal seemed only to teach the soldier a lesson and improve his life as a result and did not seem to bear any malice over having her head cut off at all!

I loved the sequence where the soldier spending all his money was illustrated by him removing coins from his money-box stomach and rolling them down a set of ramps, (like you get on some charity boxs) to land in a bucket with a satisfying chinking noise.  It was great visual story-telling and the performers acted out the various scrounging characters who were after his money brilliantly.

I’m afraid that the dogs could never be as impressive as they were in my imagination as a child, but they had a good go at it.  The dog with eyes made of real tea cups and with a wooden spoon for the body was particularly charming.

So which did I like best?  The film with all the 3-D fast frame photography and all the sets costumes and famous actors that money can buy and the latest CGI animation, (The Hobbit) or the down to earth live performance made using bits of crockery and copper kettles, (The Tinderbox)?  The truth is I liked them both, though I think the puppet show had the edge for me.  Good quality live entertainment is just that bit more special than a film at the cinema, however brilliant.

I was particularly glad to see a show at Norwich Puppet Theatre which was very well made and performed and of great quality. Norwich Puppet Theatre are a great success story having bounced back from funding cuts and have successfully secured a fresh Arts Council England Grant to produce this and other new work, (CLICK HERE FOR ARTICLE).  I was very glad to support their work and hope they continue to make more excellent new shows like this one well into the future.