This year this Festival really took off. A change of venue (Ramsgate
to Eastbourne) the strong support of Mel Myland and his family of
the WishTower Puppet Museum, Mike Everett of the MDE Toy Theatre
Press from Sheffield, an exhibition of Toy Theatres from Peter Baldwin
and the bookstall of Ray and Joan DaSilva meant that the
weekend was not to be missed. Over-subscribed for weeks before-hand with
tickets sold out completely for all the shows, the many casual visitors
on the day were unable to obtain entrance. Perhaps the only sadness was
not to have the foreign players coming over and performing due to the reduced
funding. The fitting in of so many performances in the two limited spaces
of the WishTower and the Heritage Centre required the personality
of a diplomat. The toy theatre although having a tiny proscenium requires
at least an hour I know to set up on two six feet tables. For suffering
for their art we must thank all the performers and particularly those giving
nervy premiere performances. The Festival Director was
Robert
Poulter a professional toy theatre player with all the confidence and
razamataz of an actor manager of one of the old touring companies. He is
out to prove I am sure that the toy theatre is theatre in its own right
and that it can be just as entertaining or controversial as its full size
cousin. In this endevour he encourages local schools and we saw three shows
from The Cavendish School who with their drama teacher had attended
workshops and gave us very worthwhile performances. I liked in particular
the way these school students had developed their own scripts and created
original characters and for the plays.
The festival began at Mel Mylands WishTower Puppet Museum with a short welcoming speech and wine to follow. In the limited space it was standing room only for the quicky performances. Brian Rogers worked one scene of Hansel and Gretel using his favourite Schreiber scenery and figures on a beautiful antique English stage. Brian is an enthusiastic and expert performer of the standard printed coloured Danish, German and Austrian theatre sheets and excels at the fairy story. He blended Humperdinck's music to suit the action. Later in the festival at The Heritage Centre Brian showed us his The Tinder Box (Hans Anderson) using again printed sheets but set inside his reproduction Royal Opera House which became a centre of great interest. This play has very lovely scenes in cellars, woods and palaces as well as a dog with animated eyes. Robert Poulter in contrast vigorously acted to frenetic rap music I am the King of Nineveh based upon Assyrian reliefs in the British Museum. Figures and scenery flew everywhere in the high speed changes. Robert operates the slot method of bringing on the figures which enables the scenery and characters to be changed with a quite spectacular horizontal movement. Well planned and designed the production becomes cinematic in its dissolves, back projection and horizontally moving backcloths. In the same style we saw his Konjunktur and Merry Margate plays the next day. The first a mechanistic political play set in the oilfields of Eastern Europe in direct contrast to the second a saucy advertisement for Margate both rendered at the same high efficiency. It is astounding that so much art work is displayed in a short time, perhaps in Merry Margate this increased the clutter on the playboard. What different opinions we all have about the presentation of toy theatre. In honour of Percy Press II who recently died Robert designed a fresh production of the 1827 Payne Collier Punch and Judy (MDE Publications). By using very large articulated figures still based upon the Cruikshank drawings it seems that knockabout and even death by clubbing can be successfully shown on toy theatre. My wife Sylvia and myself did the voices live and thanks to the many Puppet Guild members assembled there was no shortage of audience participation even to a glorious "Thats the way to do it" by everybody at the end, Percy would have been proud Of us. The large size of these figures overcame the difficulties I had when performing this work many times with Percy. It is sometimes not very easy to obtain a sense of theatre with the actors paralyzed in a single posture and only the size of your thumb. For myself I think this show strengthened my belief that a live performance with the lines spoken by the operator breathes vital life into the paper. An exception is the montage creation where the action is backed only by well chosen music and the toy theatre then takes on an appearance of a slowly animated book of illustrations. But in a world of mass entertainment a lone busy showman can have limited time and no other help therefore we must tolerate the flat sound of a recorded voice spoken very close to a microphone and lacking somewhat in emotion and expression.
William West printed a Toy Theatre in 1820 (now in Pollocks Toy Museum Scala St.) and two years before in 1818 the novels Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and Persuasion by Jane Austen were published. Both these stories still attract audiences of millions. The former outlining the abuses of surgery and the myth of the Noble Savage, the other dealing with the innocence of courtship and marriage of middle class provincials. Which novel is the more suitable for toy theatre? Mary Shelley was an admirer of the two colleagues Wordsworth and Coleridge and in particular she liked The Rime of the Ancient Mariner indicating her deep love of nature. We saw a production of The Ancient Mariner presented by school student Nathan Matthews of Christ Hospital Horsham. On a small stage he gave illustrations of the poem to a spoken recorded voice. This work was very ambitious to do but there was still the essence of the mysticism and fatalism of the poem and Nathan is to be congratulated for choosing and designing a drama from sucha piece of literary Imagination and Fancy.
Continuing in the same genre Bruges-La Morte by Paul Edwards derived from the photo-montage novel of Rodenbach gave us further dreamlike images. A young man searches for his dead wife against photo-backcloths of the alleys and bridges of Bruges. He follows a dancer from the Opera. Is this girl his wife whom she resembles or is it only his grief playing tricks. We sympathise with his haunted condition and the sadness is given great strength by the use of the slightly tinted photographs. Natalie Farmer's modern fable Red Riding Hood grew up in Bluebeards Castle (again using photographs) was set in a street of suburban semidetacheds. Once again the worlds of dreams and imagination were mixed with the ordinary, albeit murderous members of a family. These three works indicate one of the strengths of the modern school of small theatre, but are they Toy or New Model?
Lest we forgct, these works are supported on the shoulders of a long tradition. George Speaight reminded us of this. He presented The Slccping Beauty in the Wood or Harlequin and the Magic Horn by C. Stanfield (Pollock), his remarkable memory serving him well in his live spirited performance. First performed in 1849 at The Queens Theatre the play unusually starts long after the first act christening of the curse and its fulfillment by the wicked Fairy. The basic story of The Sleeping Beauty was first published in a collection alongside Cinderella by Giambattista Basile in 1634 and was extremely bawdy and ribald. In 1634 these fantasies had an unexpected erotic slant but nevertheless the main purpose of these novelettes was concerned with the power of laughter. By 1849 this laughter had become the dominating plot in the dramatised theatre versions and the addition of the Harlequinade helped the merriment along. George Speaight with spontaneous wit and the use of what appeared to be a duck call, intermittently blown, gave us much pleasure. So much to do, so much to pick up and interchange and at the same time say the lines, masterly is an understatement.
Barry Pointon gave us a little respite from performance by presenting his excellent slide lecture on the development of the modem theatre and its relationship to Toy Theatre. He gives this same lecture to general audiences unacquainted with our type of theatre so spreading the word. It was pleasing to hear his well written commentary and perhaps another year the Festival committee would consider having such a non performing interlude yet again.
Joe Gladwin with his hand drawn designs and a freely adapted script gave us Drakula. Joe pronounced it "Drakoolah". Like Frankenstein, Dracula (Bram Stoker 1897) has become a familiar modern myth and has always been subject to many versions and parodies even appearing on Sesame Street as a teaching aid. Even the immortal Bela Lugosi who specialised in the part of the Count on stage and film parodied himself with Lucan McShane in the film Old Mother Riley mects the Vampire (1952). It is no surprise then that todays children need to watch videos of even more extreme Gothic Horror to frighten them behind the sofa.
Joe delighted us with one such parody in live performance cleverly altering his voice to suit each character, strangulated vowels being spread thickly throughout. I liked the way Joe adlibbed when a nervous paper actor made an entrance too early. A delight for me and also an ambition satisfied was to see Barry Clarke's performance of the rarely seen The Silver Palace by G.Almar of 1834.(Sadlers Wells). The Archaic language spoken live strengthened the wonderful sets of under water caverns and masses of fountains. Obviously impossible in paper to reproduce totally this water masque but I am grateful that it is still within Barry's repertoire. He told us that it is a play that is a favourite and he has performed it from a young age. Almost all his life John Neill has had a passion for toy theatre and at a Puppet Guild meeting some time ago he told us how when a small boy he was called into the headmaster's office to be given a present of a toy theatre which was the start of it all. Now in retirement and assisted by Elaine Tubby he delights us with his skills. It takes a man of great enthusiasm and many months of patience to water colour and to cut and mount such a large work consisting of the elaborate plain sheets of the drawings of Orlando Hodgson's The Siege of Troy with its nearly 60 characters and 8 scenes each requiring at least 6 side wings and one or even two backcloths. Additionally to this labour John adapted the script to suit our modern cars and also memorised most of it. In life John is a mild mannered man but put him behind the cardboard and the performance can hold us totally, each scene at curtain rise receiving a round of applause. Gladiators in the Arena, a grand procession to equal Aida, exquisite exuberant sets, an enormous wooden horse, the tragic fall of Troy by trickery and the most glorious music of Oldfields "In Search of Troy". Thank you John and Elaine for recreating this visual masterpiece first performed at Astleys Amphitheatre in 1833. At this point may I say that although I perform using my own designs it will he sad if one day these wonderful classical plays do not make an appeararance. At the 10th Papiertheatertreffen at Preetz (12-14 Sept) only two companys were performing printed sheets, Invisius of Berlin with their Rotkappchen and Brian Rogers with his opera Hansel and Gretel.
When I saw that we were to have A World Premiere by Paul Edwards of a work never previously performed ever anywhere I felt that we were in not only for a surprise but also a shock since it was the creation of Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) the French poet and dramatist and the father of the Avant Garde Theatre. I did not attend last years festival and so I missed Ubu Roi (1896) also by Jarry but I know this play, the favourite of the 6th form drama students. Mere and Pere Ubu arc the energetic, psychopathic, foulmouthed characters of Ubu Roi, Ubuenchaine (1900) and Ubu sur la butte (1901). In these farces Jarry satirises the greed and thirst for power of the French bourgeois. W.B.Yeats at the first performance in 1896 of Ubu cried "what more is possible? After us the savage God" It was indeed a savage God that we saw portrayed in Caesar-Anti Christ. Bold startling images moved before our eyes, held together by a powerful doom-laden script. There were multiple Christs of gold, silver and bronze, a Christian Knight Templar, ancient Myth with the unicorn and the centaur and even a little metaphysics. "The circle, once it has finished, falls into disuse. The straight line succeeds it, extending in both directions to infinity" The work has rich literary metaphors such as this which create a poetic world of imagination totally enveloping the observer. Agree or disagree with its messages Paul Edwards nevertheless brought Caesar-Anti Christ to our attention using great flair. An esoteric and disturbing piece of lost theatre. Jarry went on to develop his theory of the absurd through PATAPHYSICS, which is the science of Imaginary Solutions and which had such a following that a College of Pataphysics was founded in 1949.
The weekend was stimulating theatre and we should he very grateful to Robert Poulter for sticking to his idealism and to Ray and Joan and Mike (recovering well after his serious illness) and lastly to Mel Myland and his wonderful family of The Eastbourne Wishtower Puppet Museum. In the bar of the Jevington Hotel we gained an extra hour (clocks back) so that it became an even more than usual smoky, noisy venue until the early hours.
Peter Peasgood
| Sources:
|
From the Beast to the Blond - Marina Warner ---
The Oxford Companion to English Literature ----- Dict. of Literary Terms & Literature Theory ----- Companion to Literature in English ----------------- Tile Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre --------- Dictionary of Theatre - David Pickering ----------- Halliwells Film Guide - John Walker --------------- The History of the English Toy Theatre ----------- George Speaight |
Vintage
OUP Penguin Wordsworth Reference OUP Penguin (Sphere) Harper Collins Plays Inc. |