Their production of 1984 stands apart from the rest of their work. They had wanted to do something text-based and bigger in scale. Puppet birds and bunnies shared the stage with a human cast. Newspeak slogans were brandished on pieces of cardboard. The idea of manipulation – physical, emotional, linguistic – was subtly explored. “It was a rewarding experience though I think in the end it didn’t have enough puppetry. Our idea was that the words were the puppets. I would love to revisit it and increase the visual elegance of it.”
Since the company formed, puppetry has filtered into the mainstream in a fairly dramatic way. “It’s extraordinary. Even five or six years ago that was different.” Handspring’s work for the National Theatre production of War Horse has played a major part in this, though Blind Summit’s own work is arguably just as responsible. This shifting landscape was particularly apparent at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe, where there was an abundance of puppet-based shows, including Jeff Achtem’s incredibly inventive shadow puppetry piece, Swamp Juice, with its spectacular 3D finale; The Wrong Crowd’s Nordic fairy-story, The Girl With the Iron Claws, with its monstrous troll heads and polar bears; Folded Feather’s exercise in found object puppetry, Life Still; Tim Watts’ intermixing of animation and puppetry, Alvin Sputnik. And this is only the tip of the list.
Blind Summit's Low Life.
Down wonders where the limits lie. “The challenge is whether puppetry can address more than the fact that it’s puppetry.” We’re familiar with the idea of “the puppet as a Poor Theatre tool, but to put the puppets front and centre, to put on a play” would be more of a challenge. Down half-jokes about being tempted to put on a puppet version of “a Noel Coward play or a kitchen sink drama or a Chekhov – something set in a drawing room.”
The scope of what puppets can be and can do has been explored a lot of late. The Tehran based company Yase-e-Tamam presented a puppet version of The House of Bernarda Alba at last year’s Suspense Festival, Schubert’s song cycle was staged in puppet form in Winterreise at the Tristan Bates Theatre. If there is a limit, it’s being constantly renegotiated, by theatre-makers and audiences both.
According to Down, The Table sits “somewhere between a funny play and a serious comedy.” There are elements of Pinter and Beckett in there, but it also has the feel of stand-up at times; the character of Moses is “funny, sharp and self-aware with the earthy charm and slightly smutty sense of humour of an old school entertainer.” There’s a dash of Tommy Cooper in his delivery, and he has Eddie Izzard’s capacity for digression (especially when one of his limbs comes unglued, as is wont to happen). “The challenge is taking the audience with us while we adapt it.”
It seems as if, for The Table, the process is ongoing, the piece still capable of growing. Is there ever, I wonder, a danger of the puppet taking over? “Oh God, yes,” Down laughs. “He’s a monster.”
The Table is at Soho Theatre until 26th May 2012. For tickets and further information, visit the website.
