Before COVID, when the Edinburgh Fringe Festival was a sprawling and uncurated programme that included both established companies and enthusiastic amateurs from schools and colleges, it was possible to use the Fringe as an opportunity to learn about particular strands of performance art. Although comedy often dominated, and the traditional scripted play was the default option, puppetry maintained a solid share of the programme, bringing British and international puppeteers to Scotland.
Blabbermouth Theatre's production of
The Invisible Man (C Venues, 2016) is a typical example. Taking
HG Wells' novel and imagining it as a 1950s noir comedy, it incorporated physical theatre, pulp fiction, physical theatre, a jazz score and 'mpty-clothes puppetry'.
Luke Rollason, artistic director, acknowledged in 2016 that the puppetry was at the heart of the creative process. 'I've been experimenting with puppetry as a performer for years. Earlier this year, I directed a production of
Blackout for the National Theatre Connections Festival. There was a scene involving a magical memory of the protagonist's Grandfather - and I knew a puppet was the right way to explore this memory. If the memory had to feel magical, then it had to be told through a kind of magic. And that is how I feel about puppetry - that it represents the best of what theatre can achieve, in terms of manifesting a shared imaginative world between performers and an audience.'
Rollason's aesthetic appears to have been firmly rooted in physical theatre: he worked with Rich Rusk (who had worked with Night Light Theatre and Gecko, two comapnies known for bracing physicality). 'We created a puppet out of the clothes we thought the Grandfather might wear,' he recalled. 'I wanted to explore this idea further, creating a more sustained character in the same way. By creating slits in the coat we were able to give the character hands - wearing white gloves. This led to thinking about cartoons and cartoon movement - for which hands are extremely important, in terms of making a cartoon 100% expressive.'
From this experimentation and desire to further the concept, his adaptation of The Invisible Man began with the decision to give their puppet protagonist a distinctive identity through costume. 'We had to find a style which suited him - literally. We knew that the choice of costume for the puppet would communicate a great deal about our production - and so we settled on the fedora and trenchcoat of the Film Noir detective.'
Although Rollason recognised that his experience as a clown has informed his directorial process: 'In this kind of work, we use our physicality to create games and physical improvisations that help us to discover the meaning of a scene,' he said. 'Our rehearsals are largely unplanned, as they enable us to respond to the moment, to make discoveries and engage with each other's work.'
The Man Who Wasn't There became an eclectic and dynamic response to the source material, gellefully playing with the conventions of noir and using the central puppet as an evocative presence that, like much puppetry, is also defined by a sense of absence. In many ways, the use of a puppet for a character who sits between worlds like this is intelligent and logical.
It also gave voice to Rollason's hopes for the audiences' 'magical experience, after which they will leave the theatre looking at the world with more inventive and irreverent eyes' and his belief in the power of puppetry itself. 'Again, puppetry is almost a kind of magic here - we know that something is 'just' a hat and coat, but our imagination can help us believe it is alive. And it is this very childlike, creative way of looking at the world that we want to engage with. To jolt us out of our everyday modes of thought.'
