Styles of puppet theatre

Puppet theatre has been presented in many diverse styles and for many different kinds of audience. Throughout history, the chief of these has been the performance of folk or traditional plays to popular audiences. The most familiar examples are the puppet shows that have grown up around a number of national or regional comic heroes who appear in a whole repertory of little plays. Pulcinella, for example, was a human character in the Italian commedia dell’arte who began to appear on the puppet stages early in the 17th century; he was carried around Europe by Italian puppet showmen and everywhere became adopted as a new character, hunchbacked and hook-nosed, in the native puppet plays. In France he became Polichinelle, in England Punch, in Russia Petrushka, and so on. In England alone did this wide repertory of plays based on popular legend become limited to the one basic pattern of the Punch-and-Judy show. At about the time of the French Revolution, at the end of the 18th century, a great many local puppet heroes displaced the descendants of Pulcinella throughout Europe: in France it was Guignol, in Germany Kasperl, in the Netherlands Jan Klaassen, in Spain Christovita, and so on. All these characters are glove puppets; many speak through a squeaker in the mouth of the performer that gives a piercing and unhuman timbre to their voices; and all indulge in the fights and other business typical of glove-puppet shows. It is a mistake, however, to regard them all as the same character; they are distinct national types. In Greece the comic puppet hero is Kararkiózis, a shadow puppet, who originally came from Turkey, where he is known as Karagöz.

The dramatic material in which these popular puppets play is sometimes biblical, sometimes based on folk tales, and sometimes from heroic sagas. A play on the Passion of Christ, for instance, is still presented by the Théâtre Toone in Brussels; the Faust legend has provided the classic theme for the German puppet theatre, and the Temptation of St. Anthony for the French; and the poems of the Italian Renaissance poet Ariosto, handed on through many popular sources, provide the themes of crusading chivalry for the puppet theatres of Sicily and Liège. More specifically dramatic or literary sources were used by the traveling marionette theatres of England and the United States in the 19th century, when popular plays such as East Lynne and Uncle Tom’s Cabin were played to village audiences almost everywhere.

In Asia the same tradition of partly religious and partly legendary sources provides the repertory for the puppet theatres. The chief of these are the Hindu epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, which provide the basic plots for the puppet theatres of southern India and of Indonesia.

In distinction to these essentially popular shows, the puppet theatre has, at certain periods of history, provided a highly fashionable entertainment. In England, for instance, Punch’s Theatre at Covent Garden, London, directed by Martin Powell from 1711 to 1713, was a popular attraction for high society and received many mentions in the letters and journalism of the day. From the 1770s to the 1790s several Italian companies attracted fashionable audiences and the commendation of Samuel Johnson. In Italy a magnificent puppet theatre was established in the Palace of the Chancellery in Rome in 1708, for which Alessandro Scarlatti, with other eminent composers, composed operas. In Austria-Hungary Josef Haydn was the resident composer of operas for a puppet theatre erected by Prince Esterházy about 1770. In France the ombres chinoises of François-Dominique Seraphin had been established at the Palais-Royal, in the heart of fashionable Paris, by 1781. The Italian scene designer Antonio Bibiena painted the scenery for a marionette theatre belonging to a young Bolognese prince, which performed in London in 1780. Exquisite Venetian marionette theatres preserved in the Bethnal Green Museum in London and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York City indicate the elegance of these fashionable puppet theatres of the 18th century.

During the 18th century English writers began to turn to the puppet theatre as a medium, chiefly for satire. The novelist Henry Fielding presented a satiric puppet show, under the pseudonym of Madame de la Nash, in 1748. The caustic playwright and actor Samuel Foote used puppets to burlesque heroic tragedy in 1758 and sentimental comedy in 1773. In a similar vein, the dramatist Charles Dibdin presented a satiric puppet revue in 1775, and a group of Irish wits ran the Patagonian Theatre in London from 1776 to 1781 with a program of ballad operas and literary burlesques. In France there was a great vogue for the puppet theatre among literary men during the second half of the 19th century. This seems to have begun with the theatre created in 1847 at Nohant by George Sand and her son Maurice, who wrote the plays; well over a hundred plays were produced during a period of 30 years. These productions were purely for guests at the house; they are witty, graceful, and whimsical. Some years later another artistic dilettante conceived the idea of presenting a literary puppet show, but this time for the public; Louis Duranty opened his theatre in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris in 1861, but it lacked popular appeal and did not survive in its original form for very long. The next year Duranty’s experiment inspired a group of literary and artistic friends to found the Theatron Erotikon, a tiny private puppet theatre, which only ran for two years, presenting seven plays to invited audiences. The moving spirit, however, was Lemercier de Neuville, who went on to create a personal puppet theatre that played in drawing rooms all over France until nearly the end of the century.

All these literary puppet theatres in France had made use of hand puppets, while the English literary puppeteers of the previous century had used marionettes. In 1887 a French artist, Henri Rivière, created a shadow theatre that enjoyed considerable success for a decade at the Chat Noir café in Paris; Rivière was joined by Caran d’Ache and other artists, and the delicacy of the silhouettes was matched by especially composed music and a spoken commentary. Another type of puppet was introduced to Paris in 1888 when Henri Signoret founded the Little Theatre; this theatre used rod puppets mounted on a base that ran on rails below the stage, the movement of the limbs being controlled by strings attached to pedals. The plays presented were pieces by classic authors—Cervantes, Aristophanes, Shakespeare—and new plays by French poets. The Little Theatre, like all the 19th-century French literary puppet theatres, performed infrequently to small audiences in a bohemian milieu; as a movement, this literary enthusiasm for the puppet theatre had little popular influence, but it served as a witness to the potential qualities of puppet theatre.

The puppet theatre in Japan entered literature with the plays of Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1725). This writer, known as the Shakespeare of Japan, took the form of the existing crude Japanese puppet dramas and developed it into a great art form with over a hundred pieces, many of which remain in the repertoire of the bunraku theatre today. In this form of theatre the text, or jōruri, is chanted by a tayū who is accompanied by a musician on a three-stringed instrument called a samisen.

In Europe the art-puppet movement was continued into the 20th century by writers and artists associated with the Bauhaus, the highly influential German school of design, which advocated a “total” or “organic” theatre. One of its most illustrious teachers, the Swiss painter Paul Klee, created figures of great interest for a home puppet theatre, and others designed marionettes that reflected the ideas of Cubism. The eminent English man of the theatre Gordon Craig campaigned vigorously for the puppet as a medium for the thoughts of the artist. Between World Wars I and II and through the 1950s and ’60s, a number of artists endeavoured in difficult economic conditions to demonstrate that puppets could present entertainment of high artistic quality for adult audiences. The marionettes of the Art Puppet Theatre in Munich, for instance, were striking exemplars of the German tradition in deeply cut wood carving. In Austria the Salzburg Marionette Theatre specializes in Mozart operas and has achieved a high degree of naturalism and technical expertise. In Czechoslovakia—a country with a fine puppet tradition—Josef Skupa’s marionette theatre presented musical turns interspersed with witty satiric sketches introducing the two characters who gave their names to the theatre: Hurvínek, a precocious boy, and Špejbl, his slow-witted father. In France the prominent artists who designed for Les Comédiens de Bois included the painter Fernand Léger. Yves Joly stripped the art of the puppet to its bare essentials by performing hand puppet acts with his bare hands, without any puppets. The same effect was achieved by the Russian puppeteer Sergey Obraztsov with a performance of charm and wit that was quite different from those of the great rod-puppet theatre that he founded. In England the fine craftsman Waldo Lanchester played an important part in the marionette revival; his productions included the early madrigal opera L’Amfiparnaso. Jan Bussell, with the Hogarth Puppets, achieved an international reputation with his marionette ballets and light operas. In London a permanent marionette theatre, the Little Angel, was opened by John Wright in 1961. Other permanent puppet theatres have been established in Birmingham and Norwich and at Biggar near Edinburgh.

In the United States the artistic puppet revival was largely inspired by Ellen Van Volkenburg at the Chicago Little Theatre with productions that included A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1916. She later directed plays for Tony Sarg, who became the most important influence in American puppetry, with such large-scale marionette plays as Rip Van Winkle, The Rose and the Ring, and Alice in Wonderland. A small group, the Yale Puppeteers, created a theatre in Hollywood, the Turnabout Theatre, that combined human and puppet stages at opposite ends of the auditorium and attracted fashionable audiences for its songs and sketches from 1941 to 1956. Bil Baird ran a puppet theatre in Greenwich Village, New York City, for some years from 1967 and made a great contribution to every aspect of puppetry. But the lack of the kind of state subsidy that is taken for granted in eastern Europe has made the development of large touring puppet theatres impossible in the United States. Professional puppetry there has developed in three main ways: in large, commercially supported productions for television (see below); in socially involved groups, such as the Bread and Puppet Theatre, which uses giant puppets to carry a political or idealistic message; and—at the other end of the scale—as a medium for intimate tabletop presentations by artists such as Bruce Schwartz, who makes no attempt to conceal himself as he handles a single figure with great delicacy.

Meanwhile, the puppet theatre was continuing on a less exalted plane to demonstrate that it could still provide enjoyable entertainment for popular audiences. From the 1870s a number of English marionette companies had developed the technique of their art to an extraordinarily high level, and their influence was widely spread through Europe, Asia, and America by a series of world tours. Their performances made a great feature of trick effects: there was the dissecting skeleton, whose limbs came apart and then came together again; the Grand Turk, whose arms and legs dropped off to turn into a brood of children while his body turned into their mother; the crinolined lady, who turned into a balloon; the Scaramouch, with three heads; and a host of jugglers and acrobats. The last of the great touring marionette theatres in this tradition was the Theatre of the Little Ones of Vittorio Podrecca, which introduced the marionette pianist and the soprano with heaving bosom that have been widely copied ever since.

During the 20th century there has been an increasing tendency to regard the puppet theatre as an entertainment for children. One of the first people to encourage this development was Count Franz Pocci, a Bavarian court official of the mid-19th century, who wrote a large number of children’s plays for the traditional marionette theatre of Papa Schmid in Munich. Important also was Max Jacob, who developed the traditional folk repertoire of the German Kasperltheater, between the 1920s and ’50s, into something more suited to modern ideas of what befits children’s entertainment. Almost all contemporary puppeteers have created programs for audiences of children.

In this survey of the various styles of puppet theatre in different countries and in different cultures, there are certain features that are common to many otherwise differing forms. In many forms of puppet theatre, for instance, the dialogue is not conducted as if through the mouths of the puppets, but instead the story is recited or explained by a person who stands outside the puppet stage to serve as a link with the audience. This technique was certainly in use in England in Elizabethan times, when the “interpreter” of the puppets is frequently referred to; this character is well illustrated in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, in which one of the puppets leans out of the booth (they were hand puppets) and hits the interpreter on the head because it does not like the way he is telling the story. The same technique of the reciter is found in the Japanese bunraku theatre, in which the chanter contributes enormously to the full effect and is, indeed, regarded as one of the stars of the company. The technique is also found in the French shadow theatre at the Chat Noir, and its imitators and successors, which depended to a great extent upon the chansonnier. Many recent puppet productions utilize this technique as well. Elsewhere, such as in traditional puppet theatres of Java, Greece, and Sicily, all the speaking is done by the manipulator. The plays consist of a mixture of narration and dialogue, and, though the performer’s voice will certainly vary for the different characters, the whole inevitably acquires a certain unity that is one of the most precious attributes of the puppet theatre.

Musical accompaniment is an important feature of many puppet shows. The gamelan gong and cymbal orchestra that accompanies a Javanese wayang performance is an essential part of the show; it establishes the mood, provides the cadence of the puppets’ movements, and gives respite between major actions. Similarly, the Japanese samisen supports and complements the chanter. In the operatic puppet theatre of 18th-century Rome, the refined musical scores of Scarlatti and the stilted conventions and long-held gestures of the opera of that time must have been admirably matched by the slow, contrived but strangely impressive movements of the rod puppets. When in 1662 Samuel Pepys visited the first theatre to present Punch in England, he noted in his famous diary that “here among the fiddlers I first saw a dulcimer played on with sticks knocking of the strings, and it is very pretty.” Even an old-fashioned Punch-and-Judy show had a drum and panpipes as an overture. Puppets without music can seem rather bald. At one time the gramophone was used extensively by puppeteers, and more recently the tape recorder has provided a more adaptable means of accompanying a puppet performance with music and other sound effects.

Lighting effects can also play an important part in a puppet production. The flickering oil lamp of the Javanese wayang enhances the shadows of the figures on the screen; as long ago as 1781, the scene painter Philip James de Loutherbourg used a large model theatre called the Eidophusikon to demonstrate the range of lighting effects that could be achieved with lamps. Modern methods using ultraviolet lighting have enabled directors of puppet productions to achieve astonishing and spectacular effects.