Tag Archives: shadow puppets

Suitcase Theatre to Pram Theatre?

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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Christmas Entertainment for "Santa's Late Night Shopping Evening", outside the "Coach House", High Bentham

Christmas Entertainment for “Santa’s Late Night Shopping Evening”, outside the “Coach House”, High Bentham

The Shadow Suitcase Theatre that I created way back in 2004/2005 proved extremely popular, pretty much, from the word go.  It is unusual and quirky and has the advantage of enabling the performer (me) to go and find an audience rather than the other way round.

The one-man-band aspect of singing and stamping, with jingle bells attached to my leg, also seemed to be very popular with audiences too.

The first show I created for it, “Jabberwocky!”, also proved to be a happy choice as it is a great favourite for a lot of people.  One of the obvious advantages of the poem/story is that it’s fairly short and, as such, would not clutter up the interior of the suitcase with more puppets than could be managed at once.

After a while, it became obvious that I needed a new show to go in the theatre so that I’d have something fresh to offer to festivals who might want to invite me back.  I created this second show, “Edward Lear’s Nonsense”, shortly after starting this blog, so you can see the details of my thought processes for creating this show if you search in my earlier posts.

My good blog readers kindly helped me to indentify that another musical poem would be preferable to a spoken version because less people have singing in their puppet shows.

There were far more characters, & therefore puppets, in “The NewVestments” (the Edward Lear poem of choice for the show) and I was still stuck with a suitcase of exactly the same size to store the puppets in.  Luckily, I came up with the idea of fitting the puppets between a concertina of card to help keep them in order whilst performing.

I had come up with a number of ideas for this show that wouldn’t have worked with this suitcase theatre because the suitcase was too deep (or my arms too short).  Thus, I have had in the back of my mind the idea of creating an all new, all singing, all dancing, super-duper suitcase shadow theatre using a more conventionally shaped suitcase, with a “landscape” or “wide screen TV” style shadow screen.

A number of audience members have also, over the years, told me that they would have liked to watch something slightly longer as they were enjoying it so much.  I always saw that as a plus because it is better for an audience to want more than to be bored.  Last year, I had comments from the “Edward Lear’s Nonsense” audiences saying they would have liked to see the puppets on the screen for longer or that they would have liked them to be bigger so that they could take in all of the detail.  I think the children had no problems as they can take things in very quickly and have good eyes for small detail (it tended to be adults that would make these remarks).

As I said earlier, if I made the puppets and the screen larger so that the audience could see them better I would immediately encounter a practical problem with how to store big puppets in a small space, (a space that I have to carry strapped to my body – so weight is also an issue).  If the theatre is made large enough to store large puppets then it would no longer be possible to use it in the way my current theatre is, (strapped on like an ice-cream vendors tray).

This led me to thinking; I’d not have to worry about carrying all the weight around if I were to swap to something like a trolley on wheels or some kind of pram-base.  I could store my mini P.A. system in the shopping tray in the bottom.  I could also try to work out something  more rain-proof than my current set-up.  If it was actually an old style pram, they come with rain hoods already on them – I could perhaps use the original fittings to shower-proof my shows.  The interior of a pram would also contain more room to store bigger puppets.

Thinking of ideal case scenarios as I was perusing vintage prams on Ebay, I noticed that a lot of them had a removable carry cot with handles.  What would stop me from having not only a new, slightly larger, shower proof shadow theatre, but also a portable toy theatre that could be attached or slotted into the pram base as well?

So this is my latest project idea: to create a new portable shadow/toy theatre using a pram base that will enable me to make the puppets slightly larger and, theoretically, to make the shows slightly longer if I want to.  It will also mean that it will be slightly less hard work for me (wheeling something rather than carrying something strapped to my body).

I do have a pram base already as they are so useful in street theatre for large processional puppets, lanterns and percussion rigs etc.  I will have a look at that first to see what potential it has.  Also, on March the 16th in Bentham, there will be the B.E.S.T.(Bentham Environmentally Sustainable Town) annual “Give & Take Day” which is extremely popular and a good way of reducing waste going to landfill. I shall be keeping an eagle eye out there for unwanted prams too.

Currently, I am just investigating possibilities.  I am, as yet, unclear whether I want the theatre to actually look like a vintage pram or whether it’s just the practicalities of the pram that will be useful and not its appearance.  If any of my lovely readers have any ideas about good places to look for unwanted prams (bearing in mind our High Bentham location) or ideas for adapting prams into theatres that they’d like to share, please leave a comment.

“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.