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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