more puppets!

adventures in Biggar and Treasure Island

Earlier this week, I went to Biggar in Lanarkshire which is home to a family owned puppet theatre, Purves Puppets, to see Aladdin. It was very much like The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter but in the middle of rural Scotland rather than London. The performance used hand rod puppets and blacklighting- the puppeteers invisible and the puppets themselves fluorescent bright as they flew past anthropomorphic half moons and lay down on peacock patterned chaises. There was a mural from a Russian fairytale on one of the theatre walls, embossed with costume jewellery the same style as the Russian fairytale plates we had in our dining room growing up. There was also a mural of the history of puppetry, beginning with cave men and ending with kermit the frog. I love puppets very much, and always tell people to read Puppet: An essay on Uncanny life by Kenneth Gross.There should be more puppet theatres and puppets in the world, more of its old-fashioned magic and illusion, puppet critics at every newspaper, puppet adaptations of bestselling novels instead of films. Yesterday, a pal took me to see an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island at the Lyceum theatre in Edinburgh, also a kids production but with Stevie Smith and David Hasselhoff references for the discerning adult, it was Treasure Island via Ivor Cutler. It was probably the best thing I have seen at Lyceum. There was a puffin puppet and the actors turned toothbrushes into insects and silver butterdishes into crabs, the puppeteer scuttling the dish around. I love puppets produced to look like humans and other living things, but I especially love this kind of butterdish puppetry, which is essentially a live action simile . I think a reverence for objects is often wrongly seen as greedy and capitalistic, when they contain such mystical powers of transformation and life we can bring out, when they continue to be while we die and decay in successive generations around them. Scotland also has the Sharmanka Kinetic theatre, The Scottish Mask & Puppet Centre and the House of Automata, a plethora of eeriness. At Edinburgh’s Manipulate Festival I am going to go see a puppet show called The Law of Gravity, at the Traverse though I desperately want to go see a puppet adaptation of Moby Dick playing in London at the end of January at the Barbican.

outside the puppet theatre