My appearance in”Puppets and Puppet Theatre” by David Currell

I was delighted to receive my signed copy of the New Revised Second Edition of David Currell’s “Puppets & Puppet Theatre” on World Puppet Day. I was invited to share some images of my work for the book a while back now and I am thrilled to discover that these have been included on three separate pages of the book as well as a mention in the sound equipment section, the “Contributors” section and the Acknowledgements.

To be included in this book has special significance for me because it was books like my copy of “The Complete Book of Puppet Theatre” by David that helped me to make some of my first puppets when we first started out making things for Rough Magic Theatre‘s first production “The Tempest”.

To be included in a book like this after over 25 years doing puppetry and making puppets which may inspire a whole new generation of new puppeteers is amazing and wonderful.

I have not had time to read the whole thing in depth from cover to cover, but it is clear that it is an extraordinarily comprehensive and up to date guide to puppet making, performance techniques, staging and even touches on the business side of things.

This new edition includes such up to the minute making techniques and materials such as 3-D printed puppets (featuring Nik Palmer’s work), worbla, plastezote etc. as well as traditional materials such as wood and so on.

For anybody starting out this would be an excellent buy and indeed it could be useful for established practitioners to find out about new techniques and materials etc.

This is a fairly big book and every page is literally crammed with pictures, instructions and all sorts of practical information.

I shall do a follow up on the book after I have had time to read all of it, but I feel that this is almost like an encyclopedia of puppetry that you can consult when you have a specific issue or technique that you want to know more about.

If you want a copy of the book; it can be purchased online or from The Crowood Press for £25 + £3.99 postage (£28.99) or David says you can contact him for a signed copy for £25 including postage

Contact:                 davidcurrellauthor@gmail.com

Fun at Skipton Puppet Festival

Since going to Upfront for Jack and the Beanstalk; I also took them to Skipton Puppetry Festival as well. Miranda and Anthony were both very taken with the Punch & Judy show by Clive Chandler. They kept talking about Mr. Punch and asking where he is and what was he doing? I decided to get them a set of soft children’s Punch & Judy puppets which they have been having great fun with ever since. They have Punch, Judy, a Policeman and a Crocodile in the set and they have not fought over them, as I feared they might, but have played very nicely with them and they get up to all sorts of things. Sadly, the crocodile does not have a mouth that opens and the sausages are attached to Mr. Punch’s hand but they manage to do a lot with them despite the physical limitations, (imagination is a wonderful thing).

They also saw Noisy Oyster again performing their shows “Dangerous Dave”(which Anthony did find a bit traumatic) and the “Da Silva Circus” which was, (of course) excellent and we were very kindly given a behind the scenes tour by Nik Palmer and Sarah Rowland-Barker. They remembered me from my performance at Beverley Puppet Festival (which was lovely considering that’s quite a few years back now). It was also lovely to see Liz Lempen (and her equally talented sister) again though as we were all masked up at the time we didn’t see quite as much of each other as usual!

There is more puppetry at Skipton this weekend so do check it out: “A November Day” by Thingumajig Theatre at 8pm and “Woodland Tales with Grandad” by Pickled Image at 11am and 2pm.