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Finn Caldwell, An Interview with Puppetry Director of 'Ocean at the End of the Lane'
Having been nominated for an Olivier Award for Best Theatre Choreographer and Best Set Design for his work on The Life of Pi, Finn Caldwell was one of the original puppeteers on War Horse, a show which revitalised the presence of puppetry within British theatre. He is co-artistic director of Gyre & Gimble, a theatre company specialising in puppetry, and a a long-term associate of Handspring Puppet Company. He is currently the puppetry director on Ocean at the End of the Lane, and spoke to Gareth K Vile about his career: from training as an actor to a celebrated puppeteer.
Can you tell me what inspired you to work with puppetry, and how you went about pursuing it as an artistic form?
I trained originally as an actor and had quite a traditional training at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. I was lucky enough to go straight into a career of text acting, at the Royal Shakespeare Company, on the West End and various shows.
After about five years, I realised that I wasn’t really engaging with one of the things that I loved most about theatre and that I loved during my training and my early discovery of theatre, which was big visual characters and forms on stage. I then started to explore different types of theatre, rediscovering masks and puppetry.
I went to try to find puppetry that I was really interested in, and to be honest I didn’t find a whole lot of stuff I was excited by, but there were a couple of companies that I thought were doing really really interesting work, so I asked to spend some time with them. One of the big influencers was Blind Summit back in the day, so I spent many years with them making Madam Butterfly, LowLife and various other shows and that led on to WarHorse.
I just walked into that process. I knew Tom Morris, one of the directors of War Horse from Battersea Arts Centre, so Tom gave me a call because he needed people that were actors and puppeteers to try and drive the narrative of the horses he had which were on stage for two hours with no words to sculpt their story. So you needed someone with a strong sense of acting and also the ability to do the puppeteering as well.
From War Horse, I worked a lot with Toby Olié and we formed a company called Gyre & Gimble and made several shows together. We made The Elephantom as well as many other things, and that really rekindled my desire to direct shows and to create more work with puppetry.
One of the questions me and Toby were asking ourselves was “Is War Horse the beginning of a journey up a mountain? Or is it the crest of a wave, are we at the top of the mountain, the top of the wave, and it’s all downhill from here. Is this a fad or is it the beginning of something great?”
And actually, it took us longer than you might have thought to realise that the real secret to that was making the puppets the central characters, so that was our mission from then on in to try to make characters yield in puppetry and make puppets central to the narrative and command the audiences’ emotional attention, I guess.
So that’s how I pursued it. As I got deeper into it, I learned to love more and more the aesthetic and fitting in with the other shows and the skills and athleticism of the show.
If other people are looking to get involved in puppetry, the best thing to do is to try it out.
How would you characterise the current landscape of British puppetry?
Growing. I would like to spend more time and be more in touch with what other puppetry companies are doing in England. I think it is a shame that there is such a disconnect, there is no union, no proper central body, so I guess I don’t really know what the current state of puppetry is.
I would hope from the puppetry I see around me and the work I see being made that people are more and more interested in and more aspirational and forward thinking about what puppetry is capable of. I think we are only at the beginning of the journey of the ways in which puppetry can engage and the stories it can tell.
I also think the audiences, never mind just the practitioners, but the audiences are ready for more puppetry and to be taken on more journeys with puppetry and ready to believe that puppetry can do more. I think there is a sense of anticipation and excitement, a sense of growing and moving forward.
Was there anything about The Ocean at the End of the Lane (as a script or a novel) that especially spoke to you as a puppetry director?
Hugely. I have always been a massive Neil Gaiman fan and a massive fan of comics in general. I was completely hooked on Gaiman’s Sandman series, and that really informed my teenage years and my thinking about everything that I do. So I couldn’t possibly turn down the chance to work on one of Neil’s pieces, particularly on The Ocean at the End of the Lane which is so brilliant.
On a personal level I have an ambition to make theatre more visual, more like comic books, more instantly recognisable and more aimed at mainstream audiences, so I felt like that was also a real strong desire for me to get involved with this show.
Also the types of puppets, we’ve got the big spidery creature which is called Skarthatch (although that’s never mentioned in the show). Skarthatch is like a being from another dimension. What you spend most of your time in puppetry doing is trying to get people to recognise something, ‘oh it’s a pig, it’s a dog. Oh I get it. I get when humans do that, I recognise that myself’.
We were trying to make something that had no points of reference, and that was a mishmash of different forms and didn’t have any of recognisable emotional indicates, no eyes, no ears, or fingers or any of these things, so it was a real challenge to get the audience to engage with it as a living thing, even though we were trying to not remind them of anything, and that was a real learning experience for me and a brilliant journey to go on.
How far does The Ocean at the End of the Lane share an aesthetic with your previous work?
Well it’s not designed by me. The puppets are designed and the costumes as well by Samuel Wyer who I’ve worked with many times, he was our set designer on The Elephantom, Alice’s Adventures Underground, so Sam and I have a long and very very close relationship.
I followed closely his design of the puppets and helped as much as I could with that as we went through R&D, and we spent time in his workshop working out lots of different versions of them. Nevertheless, Sam has a very particular style of making puppets both in terms of structure and particularly in terms of the aesthetic which I think is genius, and Skarthatch wouldn’t be anything without that injection of Sam’s vision.
But it is unusual for me not to be directing my own puppets these days. I guess if there is a shared aesthetic it’s to do with my adherences to the principles I use to bring things to life, but as I mentioned in the previous question lots of these things were taken away from me on this show because Skarthatch is from another dimension.
I hope that the things you might recognise from my other work is a sort of liveliness and danger to the puppets and hopefully that’s exciting and recognisable in The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
Gareth K Vile
