The puppetry renaissance

Advance ticket sales for My Neighbour Totoro, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s current production running till mid-January, beat all Barbican box-office records. I went on a rainy weekday evening last month, and the place was heaving with Hayao Miyazaki fans of all ages, lots of them clutching furry Totoros they’d bought in the theatre shop.

 It’s an impressive, dreamlike production, set in rural Japan after the second world war, and another triumph for the art of puppetry. Totoro himself is huge and cuddly, with an enormous round tummy and inane grin when he bares his teeth. There’s a whole puppeteer inside his pink tongue, as well as three or four more inside his body, which gives you a sense of the scale of him. Among the other puppets, including insects, hens and a smiling goat, is a vast yellow inflatable cat-bus, wafted round the stage by black-clad puppeteers in beekeeper veils who scuttle alongside the human actors.

This is today’s puppetry: as unembarrassed to show its working as the Pompidou Centre is to show its piping. War Horse, which began the puppeting renaissance 15 years ago, proved the power of optical illusion: if a puppet is manipulated with enough skill and empathy, we’re captivated and convinced by its aliveness and hardly notice the camouflaged operators behind or inside it. A skilled puppeteer can express the twitchiness, shyness and solemnity of an animal with one remote-control twitch of its ear or one up-and-down movement to convey its nervous breathing.

 All contemporary puppeteers thank War Horse, and in particular the Handspring Puppet Company of South Africa who designed Joey the horse to be so affectingly lifelike, for helping to bring their art into the foreground of public consciousness. ‘It was a turning point,’ says long-time puppeteer Ronnie le Drew.