A Modern Twist on Puppetry

SYMON MACINTYRE and his colleagues at the Leith-based Puppet Lab have three major projects coming up in the Inverness area, beginning with performances of Beauty and the Beast this month

THEY WILL be followed by War of the Worlds in July, and The Big Shop in October. Symon was born and brought up in Nairn, and is a passionate advocate of puppetry.

NORTHINGS: Symon, for those who don’t know the company, tell us a bit about The Puppet Lab itself?

SYMON MACINTYRE: The reason we are called the Puppet Lab is that we like to experiment with puppets doing different kinds of shows, so we are not simply doing children’s theatre, which is generally what people think of when you say puppets. We do all kinds of theatre with puppets involved, from traditional children’s shows through to some quite experimental stuff. We try to cover all the bases.
 
We are interested in the way that people like to believe that objects have a presence, much in the way that as a kid you might have played with your dolls or your soldiers and felt they were alive in some way. That is an idea that we like to play with – whatever we use, we are working with this idea that the object has some kind of living presence.

I don’t want to sound as though I’m coming over all New Age here! Obviously I know that these things are not alive, but we play with that idea that people might want to think or believe that they are, even just for a little while. We give them a little animation or a little movement, and allow people to think about them differently in some way.

NORTHINGS: And you are more than just a performance company?

SM: We do workshops as well, and we try to train people in puppetry as much as we can when the opportunity arises. We often take young people on to work with us and learn about puppetry.

NORTHINGS: How did you get interested in puppetry as a medium?

SM: I started out very traditionally in puppetry. I trained as a marionette puppeteer. Back in the 1960s my mother had a small puppet company in Nairn, where I grew up. My father ran a hotel, and mum ran the puppet shows at the Little Theatre during the trades holidays for all the kids coming up from Glasgow and Edinburgh – there were queues outside the door, I remember.

NORTHINGS: You are beginning this spell of activity in the Highlands with performances of Beauty and the Beast in Lochinver, Beauly and at InvernessFest. Is that primarily a children’s show?

SM: It’s a family show, recommended for five and over. It is based on the traditional fable of Beauty and the Beast, although I would like to think that Beauty has a bit more about her in our show. Otherwise I think she comes across as a bit too feeble for modern kids – it is all about being passed from her father to her new husband, and in our version we have given her a bit more choice.
 
NORTHINGS: It’s a feminist version?

SM: Not exactly, but we present it as a story of a girl, and we put her at the centre of the story, rather than having her as this parcel that is being passed around. I think if you are a little girl coming to see the show, you are going to be able to see Beauty as quite a strong character.

NORTHINGS: Do you find children still respond to these old tales in their modern hi-tech environment?

SM: That’s interesting, because in a way it is a case of us responding to that. The show is a mixture of simple classical story-telling and contemporary technology. We use marionettes in the show, but the whole show is filmed as it is being performed, and for the audience it is almost as if what they are watching is a television studio – the cameras are set up in full view, with a blue screen area, and the puppets are set up in another area.

The audience will see us setting up the screens and the puppets, and then they will see the final mix as the story happens not only on the set, but on the screen. It is quite a strange concept, but it works very effectively.

NORTHINGS: It’s an updating of tradition, then?

SM: Yes. I got into puppetry through marionettes, and it often strikes me as sad that we don’t really see marionette shows any more. It is such a classical form of puppetry, but it has really all but gone because no one knows how to stage them anymore.

In the old days when they toured around with the Victorian fairs they were vast encumbrances of timber that took hours to set up. What they did was create a little stage that the puppeteers could walk across the top of, dangling their puppets on their strings into this arena. The audience looked into that arena and saw the props and the backcloths and everything that the puppetry was going to use in that whole world of the stage that the marionettes were now in.

We did try to mount an old-style show five or six years ago. We got some funding for it and took it out on tour, and it nearly killed us! Most shows these days are one night only, and it took us hours to set it up and do the show, and then hours more the next day to take it down, and by the time we had it set up, everyone was completely exhausted.

NORTHINGS: Presumably Beauty and the Beast is more operator-friendly?

SM: Using the system we are employing, it takes half an hour to set up the show, and the technology serves the function of placing the puppet into its own little world again, just as in the original model, but with the added excitement of having this whole television dimension to it.

The story itself is engrossing, and at the same time you can get to see it being made before your eyes. I don’t think this had been tried before – I don’t know of anything similar. In a way it is like going back to early television, where everything is live and you have to get to right first time every time.

NORTHINGS: You did some performances in Nairn last month – how did it go?

SM: We have been very impressed with reactions so far. We are doing a fairly short tour with this, and we feel if it goes down well in the Highlands then we are on the right lines. The audiences up there are always wonderfully diverse, and it is great for us to see how it plays across the different age ranges and so on.

NORTHINGS: How many puppeteers are involved?

SM: There are two of us, myself and Kim Bergsagel, and a technician, and that role is equally important, obviously.
 
NORTHINGS: Okay, tell us a bit about the next project in Inverness, War of the Worlds?

SM: We are going to create a little street event with stilt-walking puppets as alien invaders. They are attacking humanity, and there have been a whole bunch of scientists studying them. The aliens are being pursued by the men in black, as per the Hollywood movies we are all familiar with.

The Eastgate Centre has very kindly loaned us premises for the week to build it in, and it is open to anyone over 15 to come and join us, and we will teach them about stilt-walking, We will get them involved in the group, and afterwards we will leave everything behind and they will be Inverness’s own little group of stilt-walkers who can do their own events.

I believe the Tartan Heart festival at Belladrum has already agreed to have them, so let’s hope we get volunteers! All they need to do is come along and get involved (14-19 July). The actual street performances will be on 20-21 July, as part of InvernessFest, so lookout for War of the Worlds on the streets that weekend.

NORTHINGS: And then you are back for The Big Shop event in October – how did they originate?

SM: As you know, I was born and brought up in Nairn, and as an artist I occasionally worry about the fact that I’m following my own interests and not really putting anything back into the community. There was a point in the late 90s when I was walking around Nairn and there were all these empty shops looking very desolate, and I began to think about what we could do to encourage a new way of looking at the High Street – maybe it won’t be shops in the future, it will be something else.

I remember as a kid growing up in Nairn and going down town with my parents, how many people we would meet and how everyone would be chatting and so on. It was a huge meeting place, and I thought maybe that is the key. If we could get some of these empty spaces and put something in them, and get people walking around the High Street looking in on the shows and bumping into their friends and so on, it would recreate something of that.

It also went back to the idea of theatre as something out there, not confined to a formal theatre. It was a bit like the original 7:84 ethos under John McGrath, taking the theatre out to where the people are. I remember going to see “The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black, Black Oil” in Nairn Community Centre, and everybody was there. It was so exciting and that smacked of what theatre should be about for me, not just playing to the hardcore theatre audience that go along to the Lyceum or whatever.

NORTHINGS: Was Nairn the first Big Shop project?

SM: Yes. We did it in Nairn in 1999, and I remember some official resistance to the idea that we were getting funding for it, but we had around 200 people involved by the end of it just on the production side of things, and it went really well.

Then we did it two years later in Forres, and then we did it in Leith, where the company is based. I was talking to Adrian Clark about Highland 2007, and he pointed out that Inverness has loads of empty shops at the moment, and said we should come up and do it here, and it developed from that.

NORTHINGS: How will it work?

SM: We will bring in a professional production team. The writers will be working through workshops to bring in some local stories that could be current or historical or whatever, making six 15 minute performances. The audience will gather at a central point, and then will be taken on a promenade around the town to visit each of the shops or spaces that we have converted into theatre spaces for each of the six shows.

The performers will mainly be amateurs or local people, but the production will all be professional, and we have achieved very high standards doing this in the past. There will be four groups of audience going around at the same time. And yes, there will be one puppet show in there as well!

NORTHINGS: And volunteers to get involved are still wanted for both War of the Worlds and for The Big Shop?

SM: Absolutely, yes. We mentioned coming along to the Eastgate Centre in the week of 14-19 July for War of the Worlds, and there are various workshops scheduled for The Big Shop – you can find details of both on The Big Shop website, and tour dates for Beauty and the Beast are on The Puppet Lab site [see below]. These are open workshop and information days about getting involved with the project, whether you want to perform or be a technician or whatever.

© Kenny Mathieson, 2007

Links

• The Puppet Lab