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Bedknobs and Broomsticks
It seems notable that two musicals - The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and Bedknobs and Broomsticks - that have recently toured the UK focussed on the fantastic response of children to the evacuations during World War II from English cities to the countryside. Whether this is an invocation of the ‘Blitz Spirit’, or a warning that WWII was the magical time imagined by certain traditionalists in the British Conservative Party (when the citizens pulled together to fight off the threat from the continent), it deals in a very current English nostalgia that connects to Brexit and dreams of Empire. Indeed, even the stories are slightly unfashionable children’s films, familiar in the 1970s but currently displaced by either superhero serials or North America animations in the collective imagination.
Directed by Candice Edmunds and designed by Jamie Harrison (known in Scotland as the team behind visual theatre maestros Vox Motus), Bedknobs is an extravagant, escapist fantasy that uses puppetry to conjure a flying bed and magical kingdoms of animals. An undersea competition brings on an ensemble of fish puppets, a lion rules an island isolated from humans, and the marionettes lend hyper-realism to the adventures of three young people and their unconventional care-givers. It is a shame that the script decided to dismiss most of the action as a dream - while there is potential in recognising that the threats are merely creations of the children’s fears, this is not explored but becomes a lazy resolution to the arrival of a Nazi death-squad - but Harrison’s scenography is a spectacular shifting staging that encases Edmund’s sprightly direction in a world that is as unpredictable and beautiful as a child’s imagination.
Puppets, especially the marionettes of the animals, become a signifier of the magical (the first puppets include a witch on a broomstick, observed at a distance), and intrude into the human actors’ mundane world. Despite Nazism and savagery appearing throughout the play, both as threat and invasion, the puppets are capable of softening the darker themes: the death squad are briefly characterised as shadow puppets, a smart trick which simultaneously describes their dark intents, distances them from their horrific behaviour (when they appear as humans in masks, they are suitably monstrous) and emphasises their imaginary existence. The puppet here - as in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, becomes a signifier of otherness, restoring the medium’s roots in ritual and the supernatural.
Perhaps there is something about the child’s ability to give personality to their inanimate toys, perhaps this explains the British belief in the puppets’ natural association with childhood, but the uneasiness of the scenes between human actor and marionette are imbued with menace and playfulness. A difficult blend, and it is the panache of the designer and director that make Bedknobs a forceful and engaging production.
Gareth K Vile
