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They call it puppet love


There’s nothing too surprising about the RSC staging Shakespeare’s erotic poem Venus and Adonis. But with marionettes? Gregory Doran explains.


The Guardian, 13th October 2004


In Dagmar Passage in Islington, North London, there’s a workshop where they make magic. Over the years I’ve peered through its dusty window, glimpsing a world of gentle craftsmanship. A knight in tarnished golden armour – a huge Sicilian marionette – hangs from the rafters among a little flock of cane-frame paper birds. There’s a blush-faced rod puppet peering out, bewildered at the world beyond, and a grey goose hissing at him. There are empty coffee cups on the workbenches, shelves stuffed with drippy paint pots and varnishes, wood chips covering the splashed floor-boards. I’ve often wanted to open the green half stable door and wander in to explore. Now I can.


This is the Little Angel, home of British puppetry. Its theatre, a converted temperance hall, stands next door. A few years ago it was faced with closure, and a campaign was mounted to save it. In all the shop windows of nearby Upper Street there were puppets from the vast collection the Little Angel has made in the 40 years of its existence. Even the video shop had a couple, and in one of the local estate agents little figures seemed to be checking out house prices.


Now the Little Angel is thriving again, and I’ve been introduced to some of the puppets and their makers. Lyndie Wright, widow of John Wright, who began the company, is the Little Angel’s mum. Although she has officially retired, she and her elderly whippet Nellie live next door. Steve Tiplady is the recently appointed artistic producer. His mission is to broaden the appeal of puppetry while still providing a full variety of family entertainment – to explore the use of puppets in other contexts. And that’s why I’m here.


I want to develop a production of Shakespeare’s great erotic poem Venus and Adonis as a sort of puppet masque. Venus and Adonis was Shakespeare’s first bestseller. He wrote it in 1593, when the theatres were closed because of the plague, and it was an immediate publishing hit, running to 16 editions over the next few years. It’s raunchy stuff, designed, no doubt, to appeal to the 19-year-old appetite of the Earl of Southampton, to whom it is dedicated. Not usual Little Angel fare at all.


It tells the story of the sex goddess Venus and her passionate obsession for the petulant boy Adonis. He rejects the offer of being her divine toy boy, preferring to go boar hunting instead, but finally gives in to her advances. He ends up gored by a ferocious wild boar, and Venus curses love for ever more.


I reread the poem a few years ago, when asked to devise a short entertainment for a fundraising event, and dramatised it for three voices. What emerged was a perfect example in miniature of Shakespeare’s genius: here was vivid characterisation, terrific storytelling and sublime poetry, but also sensational comic material (Adonis’s over-sexed stallion flirting with a capricious mare), followed instantly by moving tragedy. This narrative poem, so little known, might make an excellent theatre piece, I thought – if only we could work out how to stage the horses and the wild boar.


The idea to approach the poem as a puppet masque came from a visit to the Bunraku Puppet Theatre in Osaka, when we were on tour with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Japan. Bunraku performances can last many hours, and are narrated by the tayu (reciter) on a special platform on stage left, accompanied by a musician playing a three-stringed instrument called the shamisen. I was taken backstage during an interval to meet the stars of the show.


Stagehands were busy changing the sets for the next instalment. We passed racks where the master puppeteers stored their high raffia buskins, which gave them extra height over their apprentices. I peered into a sort of puppet green room where the half-life-size dolls were waiting to go on. Finally, I was shown through an indigo curtain into the dressing room of a “living national treasure”.


Yoshida Bunjaku is one of the grand puppet masters. This wise craftsman looked like a monk in his dark silk robes. He is an omo-zukai, a head puppeteer. One of his assistants handed him the gorgeous Ningyo figure of the Princess, one of the puppets from that afternoon’s repertoire. His hooded eyes rested on the back of the Ningyo’s head as he demonstrated how to make her quake with grief in her scarlet and gold kimono. Watching him manipulate the Princess, I was fascinated by how details of the headdress amplified her slightest head movements, how she could whip out a strand of hair on her otherwise immaculate coiffure to demonstrate her distracted grief, or seem to grip the sleeve of her kimono in her teeth by means of a tiny pin projecting from the corner of her mouth.


To the master’s right and left were his acolyte apprentices. The junior of the pair operated the feet: he might expect to do this for five or ten years at least, before graduating on to the left hand, operated by his companion.


Bunraku is an art form, from the early Edo period, that marries poetry with puppetry in elegant balance. The stories tell of divided lovers and suicide pacts, epic adventures and concealed identities – very much the stuff of Shakespeare’s plays, and from about the same era.


Here, perhaps, was the ideal way of presenting Venus and Adonis with a narrator and exquisite puppets in a sort of masque. Indeed, though very seldom read, the masques of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones – those opulent extravaganzas performed for King James and Queen Anne in the Banqueting Hall of Whitehall Palace – might also provide a language for performance. In one such masque, The Hue and Cry after Cupid, Venus descends from a cloud machine in her triumphal chariot drawn by silver doves – exactly her chosen mode of transport in Shakespeare’s poem.


Back home, Steve Tiplady leapt at the idea of Venus and Adonis, and at a collaboration with the RSC. Since May he has martialled an impressive international group of puppet carvers under the aegis of Lyndie Wright. In Dagmar Passage, some of the best-known names in the world of puppetry have been hard at work: Czech-born maker Jan Zalud shaping the classical lines of Adonis’s fine features; Stefan Fichert from Munich, creating the capricious half life-size horses and the shadow puppets; South African John Roberts expertly honing and stringing the limbs of the marionettes; and Simon Auton carving the wild boar. Meanwhile, the wardrobe department in Stratford were delighted to be constructing such elaborate costumes in miniature – with no need, for once, to accommodate the whims of actors fussing over their appearance.


We are in the thick of rehearsals now. Michael Pennington, an RSC veteran, has joined us as the narrator, and the whole production opens at the Little Angel tomorrow before a short run at the Other Place in Stratford. It has been fascinating observing, at close range, the tranquil skills of the puppeteers who bring their work to life with such discipline, wit and imagination, in the calm serenity of the Little Angle Theatre.



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