Proceedings of the Soviet British Puppetry Conference: Glasgow, November 1989 (Proceedings of the Soviet-British Puppetry Conference)

Proceedings of the Soviet/British Puppetry Conference, Glasgow, November 1989 Contemporary Theatre Review, 1992, Vol. 1, 1 p. 1 © 1992 Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH Photocopying permitted by licence only Printed in the United Kingdom

Acknowledgements Special thanks to: Chris Carrell (director), New Beginnings Ltd Dr Boris Goldovsky (literary editor), Moscow State Puppet Theatre Dr Svetlana Smelianskaya (artistic director), Magic Theatre, International Culture Centre, Mikhail Chekhov Centre, Moscow Mikhail Donskoy Galina Androchnikova Vladimir Bylkov (artistic director), Rostov-on-Don State Puppet Theatre Serguey Kouruinyan (artistic director), Na Doskakh Theatre, Moscow Larisa Tepper (assistant manager), Bolshoi State Puppet, Leningrad Irina Zharovtseva (general secretary), UNIMA Moscow Natalia Luneva, Leningrad Marionette Puppet Theatre Irene Pavlycheva (script editor), Skazka Olga Levitan (puppet theatre critic), Leningrad Anna Ivanova (student of theatre), Leningrad Institute Anna Nekrylova, UNIMA Leningrad Evgenij Ugrumov, Leningrad Puppet Theatre Studio Dr Inna Solomonik Contemporary Theatre Review, 1992, Vol. 1, 1 pp. 3–9 Photocopying permitted by licence only

© 1992 Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH Printed in the United Kingdom

Introduction Malcolm Knight Scottish Mask and Puppet Centre

There are some experiences which deepen with the passing of time. Exposure to and familiarity with the international art of puppet theatre is no exception. This introduction was conceived somewhere beside the Black Sea in a moment of reflection some one and a half years after the Soviet-British International Union of Marionettes Artists (UNIMA) conference in Glasgow. I have just spent the past five weeks working as visiting artistic director and designer at the Rostov State Puppet Theatre on a puppet play adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Together with the playwright Michael Gonzalez and the puppet therapist Mickey Aronoff we have been resident in Rostov-on-Don as part of a cultural exchange between the Scottish Mask and Puppet Centre and the Rostov State Puppet Theatre. With the benefit of experience and the gift of hindsight it is now possible to make some informed reflections on the workings of puppet theatres within both cultures. These reflections are offered to those working with puppets who seek to break new boundaries and to establish new beginnings with their counterparts in the USSR. As an art form in its own right puppet theatre requires a high degree of training combined with experience in other arts and an ability to synthesize them through the process of giving life to inanimate form. At a time when pressures seem to converge to drain the life out of people, the puppeteer has a special responsibility to put life back. This cannot be done in circumstances of our own choosing. The prevailing economic and political infrastructure with its cultural hegemony is, in the end, determinant. For example, there are more than 150 state puppet theatres in the USSR and each theatre employs upwards of sixty people. In contrast, there are six permanent puppet theatres in the UK, each theatre employing fewer than ten people. The history and development of puppetry in these two societies is therefore vastly different. The purpose of this introduction is to examine some of these differences and to suggest some perspectives on the f following contributions of those artists and scientists of the puppet theatre. The Conference on Soviet-British Puppet Theatre took place on the 25–26 November 1989 at the Scottish Mask and Puppet Centre in Glasgow, UK. Some sixty Soviet citizens were present for the event which was convened under the auspices of New Beginnings Ltd as a six week Season of Soviet Art in Glasgow (October-December 1989), including the cast and crew of the Leningrad Theatre of Fairy Tales (Skazka) and the Leningrad Puppet Theatre Studio. The programme was compiled by me during a ten-day visit to the USSR (Moscow, Leningrad and Tbilisi) in March 1989. The preparations for the event were started one year earlier, and New Beginnings received special financial aid from Glasgow District Council, Strathclyde Regional Council, the Arts Council of Great Britain, the Scottish Arts Council, Visiting Arts and the British Council to make it all possible. In addition, it should be noted that the event would not have been possible

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without special assistance from the Soviet UNIMA Centre in Moscow and the British UNIMA Centre in Birmingham. The articles which follow range across both contemporary and historical areas. There is something for the most eclectic of tastes in the range of concerns and the choice of topics presented. Interest in the Soviet Union is greater now than at any time in the past owing to the programme of perestroika and glasnost initiated by the Gorbachev regime in 1985. This programme of “restructuring” and “reopening” of relations with the West was launched at the 27th party congress of the CPSU politburo in 1986 and the first special conference of the party in June 1988. In a real sense, this “peaceful revolution” (to quote Gorbachev) opened the way for the initiative launched by New Beginnings to build cultural bridges with our colleagues in the USSR. It may not have been possible without them. At the time of the conference Gorbachev was seen as someone who was pushing through great and progressive changes linked to popular initiative and leadership that was more wholeheartedly democratic in tendency. At least, this was the view from within the UK. During the past two years the storm has started to break over Gorbachev with the risings in the Baltic States, the revolts in Georgia and Armenia, the “free election” of Yeltsin to the presidency of the Russian Federation, the strike of the Ukrainian miners, and a major currency and economic crisis. The puppet theatre was not untouched by these events. In 1976 it was possible for the 12th Congress of UNIMA to describe the situation in the following terms: “The Soviet puppet theatre of the 1970s, while stating its independence as an art form, affirms its right and its duty to actively participate in socialist cultural construction and, above all, in the moral and aesthetic upbringing of the younger generation” (from The Soviet Puppet Theatre Today by N. Solovyova, p. 24). An estimated 35,000 performances were given by some 110 state-run theatres, mostly for primary and preschool children. The training of professional puppeteers was taking place in drama schools in eleven cities of the Russian Federation: Moscow, Gorky, Saratov, Kazan, Yaroslavi, Sverdlovsk, Irkutsk, Novosibirsk, Voronesh, Kuibyshev and Ordjonikidze. In addition, theatre institutes in Leningrad (now St Petersburg again), Kharkov, Tashkent, Minsk and Tbilisi have created professorships or chairs of puppetry to train actors designers and directors. At that time Sergei Obraztsov of the Moscow State Central Theatre was able to point to a heightened activity an improvement in quality, a wide variety of theatres and touring exhibitions, and an overall perspective of good progress. An enormous repository of plays for the puppet theatre had also been created over a fifty-year period with each theatre employing a resident dramaturg or script editor. The 1960s had also seen an upsurge in adaptations of fairy stories for the puppet theatre, and both the Moscow State Central and the Bolshoi Theatre of Leningrad had been successful with the productions introduced into their repertoire for adults. Each state-run theatre also had a resident chief designer and composer. Discoveries in the field of scenography and the technology of puppet-making and design had also been made. The national cultures within the USSR seemed to be coexisting with many theatres giving performances in two languages (e.g. Kazan, Cheboksary, Riga, Tashkent). The wealth of national arts, crafts and applied art was well known and well integrated into many of the state theatre productions. The remarkable ensemble work of the actors across three and four generations of performers was

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considered a hallmark of what was best about the system. In many cases staff teachers studied the reactions of the audience. The position outlined in November 1989 by Dr Inna Solomonik is somewhat different in tone and response. She describes a situation of stagnancy with many puppet theatres performing plays almost without puppets She refers to the marginalization of the artist from the puppet show in favour of a director’s theatre (where many directors had not received any special artistic training). The structure of the puppet theatres had become modelled upon those of the drama theatres with predominance given to the directormanager or administrator. Another problem has become the tendency to classify puppet theatre as an entertainment for children. This has been further compounded by the usurpation of the puppet theatre for exclusively educational purposes. In short, Dr Solomonik points to a deterioration in the status of the puppet theatre and in the quality of professional work, leading to an exodus of first-rate artists, poets and playwrights. This in turn results in a neglect of daily training and an absence of honing and refining by the performer of his or her acting abilities and techniques. In her view, the basic priority is that the puppet theatre be returned to the artist or that the artist seizes the reins once again. The puppet theatre became an art of the state over a fifty-year period, and in its ascendant phase became larger in its organization than anywhere else in the world. Permanent posts were created, and division of labour resulted in the creation of larger and larger units. It could become “your profession”. But like all giant enterprises, the 150 state-run theatres have now become deeply conservative and the art of puppetry has begun to decline. In the 1990s these theatres face contradictory imperatives. On the one hand, there is a crisis of material resources which extends to a palpable lack of paper, timber, paint, fabrics and graphic design materials. It is not unusual for theatres to be unable to print their own material and for scripts not to be available because of an absence of photocopying facilities. Publicity and programmes sent to a printers may be returned three or four months after being submitted. There is an abundance of labour but a dearth of resources, owing to poor distribution and inefficient communication and transport systems. It may be observed that the most pervasive presence in the state-run puppet theatre, as elsewhere, is the black economy. The internal situation has not been alleviated by the decision of the Ministry of Culture in January 1990 to encourage these theatres to promote themselves abroad along “free market” lines. At present there is much eulogizing the “free market” multinational form of capitalism from within the USSR and companies can now charge professional fees and compete in the market place of western Europe alongside non-state companies. All of this is a long way from the popular street theatre and carnival of Petrushka of the nineteenth century. The fairground entertainments of dubious origin and intent are a product of popular culture, and both Punch and Petrushka share certain common features in this regard. The paper by George Speaight called “Petrushka and Punch: National traditions and new developments in puppet comedy” owes a large debt to a newly published work on popular entertainment by Catriona Kelly, Petrushka: The Russian Carnival Theatre (1990). He clearly outlines the form of the booth of the Petrushka performer and its probable origin via the Tartars from China. The thesis of Speaight is that the character of Petrushka as an archetypal Russian clown owes more to indigenous roots than to Italian influences from Pulcinello. The disappearance of the traditional

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figure before the Russian Revolution led to attempted revivals by Efimova and Obraztsov. The latter had more success thanks to the direct influence of an old Petrushka player Ivan Zaitsev. But the time and the moment seemed out of joint, and the authenticity of the Zaitsev performance died when he died. In its place came the state-run company. In Britain, although Mr Punch was made ill with aestheticism, a veritable cult survives and the Punch and Judy Fellowship continues to grow in both strength and number. Punch is the great challenge for the solo puppeteer. In the Soviet Union, Petrushka has almost become extinct—although I did meet a performer of the piece at the Wooden Horse Theatre in Pushkin, outside Leningrad, in 1989! There are also strong indications that a proliferation of non-state independent companies may now be beginning in spite of financial and material constraints. George Speaight asks provocative and penetrating questions, and his paper should be of interest to all researchers and puppeteers. He was also able to punctuate his presentation with a splendid collection of slides from his own collection. Anna Nekrylova contributed a detailed and extensive examination of “The Leningrad Puppet Theatre and folk tradition”. Her paper clearly differentiates between the prerevolutionary folk theatre and “vertep” (cavern, den) theatre, and the state theatre movement. She describes the most recent amateur and professional initiatives to rediscover the folk puppet, and outlines the work of Vadim Kinovitch at the Wooden Horse Theatre in Pushkin, and Mikhail Khusid at the Leningrad Institute of Theatre, Film and Television Studies. Professor Nekrylova stresses the need for contemporary puppeteers to undertake a creative exploration of traditional cultural forms. The debate about whether these forms are more properly located within folklore and ethnography, or within the framework of popular culture, is not entered into here. This volume also contains three contributions from the prolific research of Dr Inna Solomonik, who was formerly an archivist and researcher at the Moscow State Central Theatre. The first is “Home puppet theatre pre-revolutionary Russia”, which deals with children’s games, adult shows with an educational bias, and experimental studio shows and the links between all these areas and folklore. The second is “The oriental roots of Soviet rod puppets”, which is a salutory reminder that international influences may be just as potent as indigenous roots. The introduction of the rod figure by Efimova in the 1920s was properly developed only in 1939 by Obraztsov, but the evidence suggests that the influence of Javanese Wayang Goleks was established as early as 1885. The Efimov’s were building upon this root and the prior work of Richard Teschner in Austria and Edward Gordon Craig in Italy. Dr Solomonik’s final contribution to this volume is “Reasons for the present-day situation in Soviet puppet theatre. Dr Natalia Raitorovskaya explores “The artist’s puppet theatre” which was a definite movement of influence through the visual arts upon the development of the puppet theatre from 1916 onwards. She traces the influence of Mir Iskusstva [The World of Art] on the marionette theatre, and outlines the work of Dobuzhinsky and Benois, and also the Efimovs. In the same vein as Dr Solomonik, Raitorovskaya pursues the logic of the puppet being the central figure in the puppet theatre, and insists on the importance of a strong background training in the fine arts. Finally, she goes on to outline the ways in which Soviet puppet theatre has changed since the dominant influence of Obraztsov, and how current conceptions and definitions of the work are evolving. This is a powerful and

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absorbing piece of writing which indicates the need for those of us working in the field to remain open and receptive to new trends and new ideas. Those readers interested in the history and formation of state-run puppet theatres will find the contribution by Georgi Turayev essential. Skazka or the State Puppet Theatre of Fairy Tales was in Glasgow during the week of the conference with a production of J.B.Priestley’s The Snoggle or Green Blood. This Leningrad company was founded in 1944 during the Second World War when the siege of Leningrad was almost over. The transition from a small amateur venture into a large-scale state company did not happen overnight, and inevitably the struggles and the changes which ensued were often quite radical. Turayev was appointed director in 1961 of a company that had grown to include twenty-five people. The fascination of his article is that he is writing from first-hand experience while looking in a rear view mirror. He puts forward a forceful argument for the need to develop a world of beauty through the creation of a professional puppet company. Skazka’s permanent theatre now seats three hundred people, emplosy fortyfive actors, and has performed some sixteen thousand performances to over six million people! One of the most important features of the conference was the attempt to bring together creative artists and historians of the puppet theatre to the mutual enrichment of both parties. In this regard, two leading professional designers for the puppet theatre wrote down their impressions of their work. John Blundall, chairman of British UNIMA and director of Cannonhill Puppet Theatre at the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham, chose to focus on “One individual’s view of the value of the study of Russian art and puppet theatre”. He points to the seminal work produced by the artists and performers of Russia in the early twentieth century, and outlines the influence of Diaghiley, Bakst, Benois, Exter, Lissitzsky, Popova, Mayakovsky and Eisenstein with regard to the puppet theatre. He indicates the considerations that led him towards the commitment to create a fully professional staff and the need for education of audiences. He describes the effect of seeing Obraztsov in action, and the influence of the Institute of the Aesthetic Development of Children and the Moscow State Circus School. His essay ends with a series of philosophical anecdotes illustrating the need for consistency and methodical creative development and exploration throughout the life of a puppet company. He expresses the fear that the movement in the USSR towards rendering the arts more selfsufficient and less dependent on the state as a result of perestroika might lead to the wholesale loss of puppet theatres and the attendant creative specialisms and traditions nurtured by them for the last seventy years. Nelly Polyakova is the chief designer with Skazka in Leningrad. She chose to write “About my work as a puppet theatre scenographer”. Here it is the wit and sensitivity of a first-rate designer putting words on the page that must engage and challenge us. Polyakova showed a stunning collection of slides and a range of reference and depth of thought which brought the conference to its feet. Where might we find a puppet theatre designer who has worked with more than twentyseven directors on over one hundred shows in the UK? Her dictum that “The main thing is that the artist should not stop liking the puppet and should not like himself more than the puppet” remains with me to this day. Penny Francis presented a paper on “The British Puppet Theatre: Its present state and future perspectives”. Her research as general secretary of the Puppet Centre Trust over a

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fifteen-year period enables her to quantify the 250 touring companies, the handful of permanent companies in a building base, and some two hundred Punch and Judy professors. She gives a sound historical overview of the trajectory of professional companies and training skills rooted in a self-taught tradition. Then she surveys the contemporary scene and analyses out the main problems confronting those who do the work. The founding of the Puppet Centre in London combined with its International Festivals of the 1970s is clearly presented, and this is followed by a series of optimistic perspectives on the richness, variety, and resilience of current work with the future hope for the creation of a national theatre and museum. My own article on “Scottish puppet theatre: The reality behind the revival” is perhaps more cryptic and less optimistic, but nevertheless argues for the same needs, but in the context of living and working in another country. A brief overview of the development of puppet theatre in Scotland is provided with a statement of the main constraints. The conference also included several forum and discussion sessions that have not been included in this volume. These sessions were cross-cultural and comparative in nature. Lynn Barbour of Orcadia Movement in Scotland referred to the problem of working with material which was both innovative and traditional at the same time. She outlined her first endeavours to set up a multimedia folk art studio and the funding problems that ensued because of the problem of classification of the work by funding bodies and the resistance towards new ideas. Anna Nekrylova spoke of the attempt to bring puppeteers together in Leningrad to deal with precisely the same problems, and of the need to make resources, materials, and publications more widely available to aspiring practitioners. Iain Smith of Glasgow outlined his struggle to establish the Priesthill Puppets in an area of priority treatment, and of the resistance mooted by teachers and educators towards children in the puppet group who expressed ideas and activities of their own. Lynn Barbour asked what do we mean by “quality” puppetry and “traditional” puppetry and spoke of the need to balance theory with practice. She outlined the way in which she had been obliged to learn the practices of administration and the need to communicate without fear while keeping faith in the creative power of people to understand, change and transform things. In ‘The social significance puppet theatre’ in contemporary society (1976), Sergei Obraztsov concluded by stating that: The emotional force possessed by art is immense. Surely we cannot ignore this force in educating children by means of the puppet theatre, which has the power of allegory—that is, the greatest generalisation of life’s phenomena. Every government is free to plan its budget as it wishes, but as I see it, no government has the right to refuse help to those who are educating the hearts of children. We can now see that moral and ethical considerations have had their day. The Soviet Union has entered a period of crisis, and this crisis is rooted in the reality of a dependent economy and the ever-present search for the Yankee dollar. Just as there will be promarket ideas which will try to bind people to restructuring, there will be a slow but systematic attempt to dismantle the state-run puppet theatres. There will be the

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nationalisms of the non-Russians serving both to focus hatred on the central state but also to align people with local bureaucrats to reform the existing structures. In this sense the state-run puppet theatres will now need their publicity and marketing managers to organize both national and international promotions. The price of tickets in one theatre has recently risen from fifty kopecks to one rouble per child. The political crisis of transition to a “free-market” economy will carry with it the burden of increased costs for each theatre as it is cast adrift to become self-sufficient. The accumulation of frustrations and oppressions both inside and outside the theatres will put at risk in the end, the very concept of state funding. Meanwhile, in the UK those of us struggling to create puppet theatres, to secure stable incomes and to train specialist actors and directors, will find ourselves increasingly drawn towards the arguments for some kind of state planning and state regulation to prioritize the art form. As more and more theatres are threatened with closure and state funding gives way to incentive and enhancement finance aided by the uncertainties of commercial sponsorship, the small puppet theatre units remain atomized and disorganized like feathers for each wind that blows. The failure of an advanced industrial society to perceive the importance of a process which puts life into inanimate objects, which simultaneously draws life out of and returns life to people, is an indictment of a vacuous monetarist system. Ironically, we shall need to seek out the folklore and imagery of contemporary engineers of the imagination in order to create larger units to fulfil social need. This will, of necessity, involve the creation of puppet centres which function as integrated complexes and contain theatres, museums and archives, and education and training institutes. Such centes will not survive if they do not connect with the needs and requirements of professional puppeteers and mainstream educational provision. The idea that subsidy is a right and not a luxury will have to be fought all over again. In a nutshell, we must ask whether the art of the puppet is self-sufficient and autonomous like some “art for art’s sake”; or whether it is learned and acquired and dependent on an economic infrastructure for all its “relative autonomy” and future development? Contemporary Theatre Review, 1992, Vol. 1, 1 pp. 11–17 Photocopying permitted by licence only

© 1992 Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH Printed in the United Kingdom

Petrushka and Punch: National Traditions and New Developments George Speaight Writer/Historian

It is commonly claimed that Petrushka and Punch are descended from the Neapolitan character of the Commedia dell’Arte, Pulcinella, whose puppet comedy was presented throughout Europe by Italian showmen in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There is certainly a family resemblance between Pulcinella, Punch and Petrushka, but they are not the same characters, nor do they appear in the same plays. It is true that they are all glove puppets; that they all speak in a shrill voice produced by a squeaker—called a swazzle in English—that the performer places in his mouth; and that their plays are all performed by one puppeteer, often in the street or in some open space. The plays all consist of a comic hero encountering a succession of subsidiary characters, and each encounter is likely to be terminated by a fight or other physical action. But these are the essential characteristics of popular glove puppet shows everywhere. We should examine the Punch and Petrushka plays in greater detail to try to distinguish their different features. Most people in this country are probably familiar with Punch and Judy; however, for the benefit of Russian readers, I shall give a brief outline of the show here.1 Puppet shows had been a popular entertainment in Britain since at least the middle of the sixteenth century. A puppet show was actually introduced into Ben Jonson’s play Bartholomew Fair in 1614; from this we can learn that it was almost certainly presented by glove puppets, and that the subject matter was a vulgar parody of a Greek legend in which fights and amorous exchanges were largely featured. There was no single comic hero. In 1662, a puppet theatre introducing the character of Pulcinella was brought to London by a visiting Italian showman. This was almost certainly performed with marionettes, that is, puppets controlled by wire or string from above. The character of Pulcinella was adopted by the English and his name transposed to Punch. In the process he largely changed his appearance and began to appear as a kind of resident clown in a completely British repertory of folk dramas. In this role he seems to have carried on a much older tradition of comic buffoonery that can be traced back to Elizabethan drama and medieval morality plays. Throughout the eighteenth century marionette plays of this kind, featuring Punch, remained popular, but the older glove puppet tradition survived in the form of open-air shows at fairs, also introducing Punch, which were used to attract customers to the fairground marionette booths. Towards the end of the eighteenth century these marionette folk plays died out, and the glove puppet Punch shows moved on to the streets. At about

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this time at least one Italian puppet showman was performing in London, and a regular format for the Punch and Judy show emerged. The full text was recorded in 1828. It is not entirely clear to what extent this text represents an English tradition that had developed over the centuries, or a recent Italian import. There are probably elements of both. The text of 1828 has provided a standard format—with respect to the sequence of events and characters rather than verbally—for the show that has survived to the present day. Punch calls for his wife, Judy; she gives him the Baby to nurse; the Baby cries, and in desperation Punch throws it out of the window; Judy returns, and when she learns what Punch has done she beats him with a stick; Punch beats Judy, and kills her; a succession of other characters will now call upon Punch, and may include a Doctor, a Foreigner or Black Man, a Dog (Toby) and its owner, a Crocodile, and the Ghost of Judy; they are all knocked out by Punch’s stick; in these games, or fights, Punch is partnered by a Clown, who often produces a string of sausages; finally Punch is arrested by a Policeman and condemned to be hanged; but by a trick Punch hangs the Hangman; finally the Devil comes to take Punch away, but Punch defeats even the Devil and is left victorious at the end. Now let us compare the story of Punch with what we know about Petrushka. I hesitate to embark upon a discussion of Petrushka in the presence of Russian experts, but my information is largely dependent upon the research of the English scholar Catriona Kelly,2 whose book on Petrushka represents an outstanding contribution to AngloRussian scholarship in the area of popular entertainment. Puppet theatres have existed in Russia since at least the seventeenth century. There is a well-known drawing of a glove puppet show in the Moscow area that was made by a foreign traveller, Adam Olearius, in 1656. Olearius stated that the show consisted of “brutalities and sodomies”. This subject matter, as viewed by a censorius Western visitor, is not dissimilar to that of the puppet play in Barholomew Fair. There is no indication that this show had anything to do with Pulcinella, and the form of booth that seems to be supported on a frame resting on the performer’s shoulders, with the cloth hanging round his body, is found in several illustrations of Chinese puppet shows. I do not think it was ever seen in western Europe, and I suggest that it was introduced into Russia via Tartary by Chinese showmen, though the content of the performance must have been Russian. There are no literary or pictorial references to a Petrushka puppet show in Russia before the nineteenth century. The earliest reference that has been found is in a story called The Petersburg Organ-Grinders by D.V. Grigorovich, published in 1842. But Italian puppeteers had been touring Russia at least since early in the nineteenth century. After the 1840s references to Petrushka become common, and there is a particularly interesting account in 1876 by Dostoevsky, who had a great love for the Petrushka show. But in the accounts of both Grigorovich and Dostoevsky the chief character is not called Petrushka. In the show described by Grigorovich he is called Pulcinella; in the show described by Dostoevsky he is called Pul’chinel. But in both these performances there was another character called Petrushka! In 1842 he was a minor figure who only appeared in the last scene and who tried unsuccessfully to rescue Punch from the Devil. By 1876 Petrushka had developed into a comic companion, described by Dostoevsky as playing the role of Iago to Pul’chinel’s Othello.

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Benois’ description is so interesting and, since an English translation is not available, it is worth giving it here in full:3 I took my friend to see Petrushka. Fathers and their children were packed together to watch the immortal folk drama, and it was in fact just about the funniest thing going on at the Shrovetide festival. Why do you think Petrushka is so funny, why does the performance make everyone so happy, children and old men too? But what a character, what a unified and artistic character he is! I mean Pulcinel. He is a bit like a mixture of Don Quixote and Don Juan. He’s so trusting, he’s so merry and open-hearted, how angry he gets when he comes across evil and deceit, he doesn’t want to believe it exists, how he flings himself, club and all, on the perpetrators of injustice, and vanquishes them straight away. And what a scoundrel that Petroushka, his constant companion, is. How he deceives Pulcinel and laughs at him behind his back, and Pulcinel doesn’t even notice. Petrushka is like Sancho Panza or Leporello, but he’s become a completely Russian popular hero. Who was this Petrushka? I suggest that he was the archetypal Russian clown, the r’izhii, a red-headed comic, a figure drawn from folk tradition whose crude buffooneries diverted circus audiences in the nineteenth century. His origins are lost in the myths of time. He was older than Pulcinella. He may have appeared in the puppet show seen by Olearius. He was introduced into the Italian puppet play as a minor character, but he soon took it over and became the hero himself. Look at him! This is not Pulcinella nor Punch, but a true Russian folk comic hero in his own right. Just as Punch is an English clown who borrowed and distorted Pulcinella’s name and transformed his appearance and character, so Petrushka is a Russian clown who captured Pulcinella’s show and made it his own. In the process, however, it was inevitable that something of the original Pulcinella show was retained. In Russia, there was never one fixed Petrushka show, in the way there was a standard Punch and Judy show in England. Here, however, is a description of a Petrushka show as seen during the last decades of the nineteenth century, as remembered by Alexandre Benois, the great stage designer (Benois, 1960). The musician places his barrel organ on a folded sack; and suddenly above the screens appears a tiny, hideous manikin. He has a huge nose, a broad smile that never leaves his lips, and on his head is a red-crowned hat shaped like a comet. He is astonishingly nimble and quick in his movements, with tiny hands which he uses effectively to express his feelings and thin little legs hanging over the top of the screen. Petrushka immediately assails the musician with silly, impudent questions to which the latter replies gloomily. That is the prologue to the tragedy which is then unrolled before our eyes. Petrushka is in love with the hideous Akulina. He asks her to marry him, she agrees and they perform a sort of honeymoon stroll, hand in hand. Then in comes Petrushka’s rival—a sturdy, moustachioed policeman, whom Akulina obviously prefers to Petrushka. The latter in a fury strikes the guardian of law and order, and as

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a punishment is forced to become a soldier. But training and discipline do not suit him, he continues to riot and then—oh, heavens!—he kills his N.C.O. This is followed by an unexpected interlude. Suddenly, for no particular reason, two negroes appear dressed in brightly coloured clothes. They both carry sticks, which they throw skilfully up into the air and from one to another, and then use to hit each other over the head with resounding blows. The incident is over. Petrushka again appears on the screen with the musician; he insults him, squeals and giggles. Suddenly a shaggy little figure appears by his side. Petrushka is delighted, strokes the little animal and jumps astride it. But the lamb suddenly rears up and throws his rider and—oh, calamity!—it is not a lamb at all, but the devil himself—a devil covered with black hair, with horns and a crooked nose and a long, red tongue protruding from a toothy mouth. The devil gores Petrushka and shakes him mercilessly, his little legs and arms dangling on every side, and then drags him into the underworld. Petrushka’s wretched body is thrown up into the air a few more times, then his death rattle is heard and an eerie silence follows. The musician plays a gay gallop and the performance is over. In addition to the characters in this description, a Petrushka show might have included scenes with a Gypsy, who sold a horse to Petrushka who threw him off; a Doctor, who came to heal him; a German who could hardly speak Russian; and the Devil disguised as a lamb was more usually a real Dog who carried Petrushka off at the end of the play. Other characters might be various foreigners, a Tartar, a Chinaman, an Arab, or a Jew; a Rag Seller; a Monk; a smart Toff; a Matchmaker; and Petrushka’s friend, a clown figure called Filimoshka. Yet people loved him. For all his vulgarity, he was the voice of the common man. It would be fascinating to distinguish how much of this was taken from the Italian Pulcinella show and how much was original Russian contribution. But any analysis of that kind is very difficult. I would, however, venture to guess that there is less Italian material than has been suggested by Catriona Kelly, who bases her analysis on the theories of Michael Byrom (1983). So much for past history. Let us now consider the state of Petrushka and Punch in their respective countries during the present century. In pre-Revolutionary Russia Petrushka shows seem to have remained popular, both for proletarian audiences and in a more refined form, as a home entertainment for middle-class children, up to at least the early twentieth century. But in this century there seems to have been a feeling that, however nostalgically the old Petrushka may be remembered, it needed some reinterpretation now. It is worth noting that when Benois devised the scenario for the ballet Petrushka in 1911 he completely transformed the character into a lovesick figure like Pierrot. The Petrushka of the ballet has no resemblance whatever to the puppet. It is a wonderful ballet, but it is not Petrushka! A few years later the Great War and then the Revolution convulsed Russian society, and in the process an exciting new spirit in art was set free. Petrushka did not escape this contagion! It was in this atmosphere that a cultured married lady, Henriette Pascar, living in Petrograd, conceived the idea of establishing a Children’s Theatre. This was basically

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for human actors, but it was planned to include puppet productions as well. Though she was a totally modern connoisseur of art, with an enthusiasm for constructivist scenery and the music of Moussorgsky, Pascar had a great love for the traditional Petrushka, whom she described as “this so funny character of the Russian puppets, full of fun and zest.” She prepared a repertory of Russian folklore, with popular songs and anecdotes in which Petrushka would be the chief character. Sadly, this plan was halted before a single puppet performance could take place as the project was closed down in the political climate of the time as being bourgeois in conception and lacking in propaganda. It is clear, however, that Pascar’s Petrushka would have been far removed from the genial anarchist of the Russian fairs (Pascar, 1930). At about the same time, in 1916, an art student called Nina Efimova volunteered to put on a puppet show for the Moscow Fellowship of Artists. She conceived a play with five figures, loosely based on Petrushka characters. It was liked, and repeated, and she received an invitation to play at the Café Pittoresque, a famous art cafe in Moscow. But meanwhile, the Petrushka puppet had been lost. She created a new repertory, and the show, now presented with her husband Ivan, developed enormously. Petrushka was left behind. People sometimes asked her why she didn’t perform the folk play of Petrushka, but she felt that the plays of the popular theatre, designed for adults, would be wrong for the children before whom she now played. She did not despise the traditional theatre, but she wrote, “My theatre is individual and in this sense stands in opposition to the traditional.” She did, however, still introduce a reformed Petrushka into the repertory in such pieces as Gay Petrushka, which usually opened the programme, and the Russian of her memoirs, published in 1925, was Memoirs of a Petrushka Player. But Efimova’s Petrushka was no more the traditional puppet than was Benois’, nor than Pascar’s would have been (Efimova, 1935). In 1923 a young actor called Sergei Obraztsov was invited to contribute a turn to an evening’s charity entertainment in the Musical Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre. He was known to be fond of puppets, and it was suggested that he should put on some kind of Petrushka show. At this time Petrushka shows had not been seen on the streets of Moscow for many years, but Obraztsov dug out an old Petrushka performer. Ivan Zaitsev taught him everything. And Obraztsov is a fine puppeteer. But the show was a flop. Afterwards, analysing the reason, Obraztsov admitted that he had been insincere in his presentation. “The absence of sincerity,” he wrote, “always cancels out the value of the work of even the most experienced professional.” Zaitsev was sincere, and when Obraztsov had established the State Central Puppet Theatre he engaged him as a member of the company, where he continued to perform traditional puppet shows in suitable venues. But after his death no one succeeded him. The other members of the company could not perform the old repertory with sincerity (Obraztsov, 1950). These were all attempts to revive the traditional Russian puppet show in a form that would be suited to the modern age. They all failed. Since then I do not know of any reintroduction of Petrushka in the Russian puppet theatres, though I would be glad to know if I am mistaken. The contemporary Soviet puppet theatres, with their outstanding achievements, have not been able to find a place for what Obraztsov described as “a living being of flesh and blood, with a heart and a soul, and a mind and a personality” (Obraztsov, 1967).

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In contrast, what has happened to Punch in Britain? Here, too, the artistic revival of puppetry in the early twentieth century found no place for Punch. When Walter Wilkinson wheeled his puppet booth through the countryside in the twenties and thirties and wrote a series of charming books about his experiences, it was hailed everywhere as Punch and Judy. But it was Punch and Judy with no Punch and no Judy. Walter Wilkinson wrote: “The old show is perfect in its way. It comprises and exhibits vividly all the peculiar talents of this form of puppet. It has passed through the hands of hundreds of clever showmen, and a perfect manipulation and type of performance has evolved. But all the same it is old, it is dying, it is an antique falling to pieces…. Surely the whole British nation need not be slaves to this one idea. After three hundred years we might try to think of something a little more suitable to the times…. With regard to Punch and Judy shows it is necessary that we should have a revolution” (Wilkinson, 1927). Other gifted glove puppeteers have felt the same way; however, the traditional Punch and Judy show survived, and still survives, and indeed flourishes. In the mid-fifties there were resident Punch performers at over sixty seaside resorts and holiday camps in Britain. Since that date the decline in English seaside holidays in favour of sun bathing on the Costa Brava has led to a reduction in Punch and Judy shows on the sands, but there are still at least 150 active Punch performers in the country with two rival organizations to campaign for them: the Punch and Judy Fellowship and the College of Punch Professors. They play at summer fêtes and children’s parties, and often combine their entertainment with ventriloquism and conjuring. The actual content of the Punch show is changing, dialogue is almost disappearing, and it is becoming more and more a slapstick entertainment aimed at young children, with a great deal of audience participation. In reaction to this, one or two Punch performers formers have tried to revive the vulgarity and the indecency of the original tradition. There is even a Punk and Judy puppet show! The late Barry Smith, one of the most creative puppeteers of recent years, devised a particularly effective example of this genre. He told me how he used to feel carried away while performing this, in a way he had not experienced in any other production. These shows would like to give to Punch the frustrated voice of an older Britain that is being smothered in a bourgeois materialism. There have been many protests at the violence of the Punch and Judy show from educationalists and other guardians of public morals, although these complaints seem less common than they were some years ago. Almost every one seems to take the view that the show is so remote from any kind of reality that no one can take it seriously, and that indeed the spectacle of two grotesque wooden puppets banging each other on the head, which always rouses roars of laughter from the spectators, is actually a healthy release for the instincts for violence that we all have inside us. The Greeks had a word for this— catharsis. It is tempting to embark on sociological theories as to why the traditional Punch show has survived in Britain but disappeared in the Soviet Union. The obvious explanation is that this is due to the very different social and political circumstances of the two countries during this century. And that may well be true. But Punch has also disappeared in the United States. There, the educationalists have banished Punch and Judy from schools and public places. Macey’s store in New York has banned it from its shopping mall, and it is condemned as an incitement to baby-bashing and wife-beating. An English Punch performer is at this moment trying to undertake a tour of the United States with a Punch

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show that can be advertised as free of violence. Some of us would say that if you take the violence out you have nothing left. So, what of the future? Punch and Judy can be a smashing piece of theatre when it is well performed, and we all hope that it will survive in Britain, but we must admit that it has already reached the same kind of status as morris dancing and folk songs. Punch professors are now being invited, along with beefeaters from the Tower and guardsmen in red uniforms and red London buses, to take part in British Weeks all round the globe. It is something to be preserved, and well worth preserving, rather than a living and developing form of theatre. We must always salute the spirit of the Punk and Judy shows, even if we don’t always like what they do, but I feel that they can only exist on the fringe of our puppet theatres. In the eighteenth century Punch was the hero of a constantly renewed repertory of dramatic plays full of contemporary satire. But there is no sign of that situation being repeated. Satirical puppetry does exist in the television programme Spitting Image and its foreign imitators, but that cannot claim any real connection with Punch. In the Soviet Union, Petrushka appears to be extinct. But extinct volcanoes do sometimes spring to life again. It would be presumptuous for me to propose patterns for puppet comedy in the Soviet Union, but I must confess that, though I admire the productions of Soviet puppet theatres, I cannot, in my limited experience, remember often laughing at them. There was, of course, Obraztsov’s brilliant one-man performance, and The Unusual Concert; but these are fairly old history now. There may well be others and I hope to hear of them. But there is one area of comedy in which Russian artists do indeed excel. And that is the circus. The old red-headed circus clown of Russian tradition has been replaced by a more naturalistic and quieter comedian, but a comedian who is a great deal funnier, and more inventive, than almost any of the clowns in European or American circuses. Clowns like Karandash and Popov charted the way, but those of us who have been lucky enough to see Anatoli Martchevski or Yevgeny Maikhrovsky know that equally gifted artists are following in their footsteps (Speaight, 1980). Soviet circuses have demonstrated how a tradition can renew itself, transforming itself in many outward respects but remaining faithful to its true spirit. I have been told that a clown in the Leningrad Circus has actually appeared as Petrushka. Can the spirit of Petrushka spring back to life in the Soviet puppet theatres? Perhaps, if Punch preserves his traditions and Petrushka, under the inspiration of glasnost and perestroika, adventures into new areas of comedy, we shall have tradition and experiment in an ideal AngloRussian concord!

Notes 1. For a fuller description see George Speaight, The History of the English Puppet Theatre (revised edition, 1990); Robert Leach, The Punch and Judy Show (1985); Michael Byrom, Punch and Judy: Its Origin and Evolution (revised edition, 1988). 2. Petrushka: The Russian Carnival Theatre 1840–1930, published by Cambridge University Press in July 1990. There are also important contributions in English by Anna Nekrylova on “The Traditional Architectonics of Folk Puppet Street Comedy” and by Natalia Smirnova on “A Few Words on the Method of Traditional Puppet Dramas and their Role in the Development of Russian Culture” in International Symposium of Historians and Theoreticians of Puppet Theatre, Soviet UNIMA Centre (1983).

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3. Dnevnik pisatelya 1876. Diary of a Writer, but the English published translation does not include the Petrushka passage.

References Benois, A. (1960) Memoirs. London. Byrom, M. (1983) Punch in the Italian Puppet Theatre. London. Efimova, N. (1935) Adventures of a Russian Puppet Theatre. Birmingham, Michigan. Kelly, C. (1988) From Pulcinella to Petrushka. In Oxford Slavonic Papers, vol.1 xxi. Oxford. Obraztsov, S. (1950) My Profession. Moscow. Obraztsov, S. (1967) Some considerations on the puppet theatre. In The Puppet Theatre of the Modern World. London. Pascar, H. (1930) Mon Theatre a Moscou. Paris. Speaight, G. (1980) The Book of Clowns. London. Wilkinson, W. (1927) The Peep Show. London. Contemporary Theatre Review, 1992, Vol. 1, 1 pp. 19–24 Photocopying permitted by licence only

© 1992 Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH Printed in the United Kingdom

The Leningrad Puppet Theatre and Folk Tradition Anna Nekrylova Institute of Russian Literature, St Petersburg

The relationship between professional theatre and folk theatre has never been simple in the history of the Russian culture. The theory of evolution, which dominated Soviet science for a long-time, had it that professional theatre was rooted in folk tradition. But such a view with its retrospect that includes the puppet theatre, ignores obvious facts. The first performances for intellectuals, which began in Russia in the twentieth century, had little resemblance to the folk theatre and the “agitation theatre” of the days of Civil War following the 1917 Socialist Revolution. The first productions for children were so removed from folk tradition, that this trend soon exhausted itself. The genuine professional puppet theatre in Russia had a completely different origin, which had nothing in common with the traditional theatre. I should mention the fact that the folk puppet theatre appeared in Russia comparatively late—in the seventeenth century. The vertep theatre1 and marionettes were mentioned in records from the eighteenth century, a turning point for the Russian culture and the arts. That was the time of Tsar Peter the Great’s radical reforms, the time of dramatic change over from the patriarchal way of life to the Western pattern. It was a time when towns and cities began to flourish, the time of the first contact between Russian and European cultures. St Petersburg, a new type of city, emerged in an empty place and grew into the capital of an enormous country. It brought about the phenomenon called low-class urban culture, or the original townsfolk lore, which embraced rural genres, adapting them for new conditions, and of course, there were new forms, including theatre. It was only natural that the capital city with its numerous folk festivals, holidays and other costly affairs, attracted puppeteers, both Russian and Western, who wanted to earn a lot of money, and learn what others in their trade were doing. Also the lubok books were published in St Petersburg. On one hand, their texts were adapted versions of folk theatre performances, and on the other, they could be used for a new puppet production. As early as 1733 the newspaper Vedomosti [Chronicles] published in St Petersburg, mentioned the folk “puppet games”, in which marionettes were used. In the same year Johann Christofer Zigmund brought to Russia his productions of Adam and Eve, Don Juan, and Joseph the Handsome, classics of the European puppet tradition. In the second half of the eighteenth century, Western puppeteers made regular tours of St Petersburg with marionettes, glove, shadow and mechanical puppets. In 1840 the first written record was made about the most popular character in the Russian puppet theatre—Petrushka. There are several descriptions of the Petrushka comedy, which was played in St Petersburg, and several variants of the written text, dating back to the turn of the century. As a phenomenon of mass culture, the Russian folk theatre existed only for a short time—about two centuries. Its many forms were already extinct by the beginning of this century. Even the most popular Petrushka performance of the period after World War I did not have its own place among other types of entertainment favoured by common

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people, although it certainly had its influence on the advance of the professional theatre in Russia. When the first Soviet government was creating new theatre, which had to be understood by all, and be accessible to all, it seemed quite natural to look back at history. This was how the most popular character of the traditional Russian puppet theatre—a born companion, the all-winning Petrushka—was borrowed. Also borrowed from the past was the format of the performance, which consisted of several separate scenes, joined together by the main character. Petrushka did even more than was expected of him—he was giving a good thrashing to the enemies of the Revolution, winning the battle for a new way of life. He was lecturing on things like learning to read and write, or the rules of conduct in the street. He pictured various professions, ridiculed idlers and lazybones, and so on. There were scores of plays like those in the first post-revolutionary years in Russia, but most of them did not last for more than several shows. In retrospect, that is a good example of the wrong way to exploit tradition. After the culture boom on the twenties, folk puppets stopped being a genuine folk creation. They could not form a foundation for the newly emerging professional puppet theatre. Since the end of the last century researchers have been expressing their concern with the disappearance of the true forms of folk culture. In the mid-twenties a group of enthusiasts in Leningrad attempted to set up an experimental theatre with the National Ethnography Museum. Their intention was to revive the puppet theatre. For various reasons, the company did not last long. They never even approached the puppet in their work. For more than half a century folk puppet theatre existed in Russia only on the pages of a few popular articles and in studies of the puppetry history (the well-known works by Vsevolodsky-Gerngross, Bogatyrev, Eremin). Transcripts of folk productions were not published, apart from the 1927 translation by Tsekhnovitzer of one of the Punch and Judy shows, and the only complete text of a traditional Petrushka show which was included in the 1953 anthology compiled by Pavel Berkov. The puppet theatre only borrowed fairytale plots from folklore plays. However, in recent years, there has been a return to the traditional, though not necessarily Russian, puppet theatre. As a result of this there are in Leningrad: (i) a number of amateur groups and individual artists trying to revive folk puppet theatre; (ii) professional groups oriented towards folk puppet theatre; (iii) a trend followed by professional puppeteers in which they attempted to master traditional methods, and use them subtly and creatively in their work. Before explaining this let us discuss the reasons for this interest. In my understanding, one of the main reasons for this was the dissatisfaction expressed by the puppeteers of the forties and fifties, with their naturalism and reluctance to change the limits of the commonly accepted, their emphasis on didactics in productions for children, and their showy element in productions for adults. In the sixties and seventies, Soviet theatre went head over heels in experimenting, searching for previously unknown forms, unrestricted expansion of the puppet theatre borders and conquering foreign territories and methods (excursions in the realm of drama, cinema, cartoons, fine arts, pantomime, giving up the screen, indulging in the open support of the puppets, the usage of masks; making the puppet and the actor equal partners, and so on).

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But such a period could not, and did not, last long. Eventually, a saturation point was reached producing a dead end. And once again everyone looked towards the past, towards the classical legacy. Generations of artists were overwhelmed with the charm old puppets had on their audiences. Audiences were fascinated with the organic combination of the exterior and interior of the puppets; they admired the old puppeteers who had a way of using very appropriate characters for their productions, where the form and the substance were as one, where the essential meaning was included in a formula reflecting the activity of the audience, and where the performers and the audience were seeing eye to eye, producing the kind of theatre in which abstract notions went together with simultaneous response to current events. Today’s puppeteers are fascinated and astonished by the absence of contradiction between a limited set of characters, their primitive plot and undertone, and methods characterized by the outward simplicity of the folk theatre, and its rich, multilayer contents that the present-day theatre lacks. It is no longer a paradox today to think that a return to tradition is conducive to a fresh look at familiar things and events, which facilitates the advance of our understanding of the world we live in. Now let us return to the Leningrad phenomena I listed earlier. (i) The emergence of amateur groups and individual artists who attempted to revive folk puppet theatre tradition may be seen as an expression of the general interest in Soviet history and culture. Today we reopen the pages of our history book, which also deals with traditional art. In this context there lies the interest in the market-place puppet, and other forms of traditional theatre. I personally know four Leningrad vertep companies, two of which perform only in the home, and a third set up by a group of like-minded people exclusively for their own use. However, the vertep theatre was not very popular in St Petersburg; it was more characteristic of Byelorussia and the Ukraine, since it originated from Poland. It was then taken to some western Russian territories like Novgorod, Smolensk and Pskov, and further east to Siberia. This type of theatre used a portable box with one or two storeys (balconies) made of thin wooden planks or cardboard. The audience side was open, or could be closed with shutters, a piece of cloth or curtains. The puppets were fixed on special rods which could move in slots in the bottom of the box, and in the divider plank between the storeys. The puppeteers, who stood behind the box, worked the puppets, and spoke their parts. In Russia, the vertep performance was almost universally based on the story of King Herod, with a follow-up performance, consisting of scenes from everyday life usually accompanied by singing and playing folk music instruments. The upper storey was for Nativity plays, and the lower for King Herod, and amusing anecdotes from everyday life. The puppets were wooden, brightly coloured and dressed in garments made of cloth or paper. The vertep theatres of today (belonging to the Lapins, the Fedkos and the Gorensteins) are run by the joint effort of members of artistic and musical families. Their productions are usually based on a published text, which they use in an unabridged form, with only a few alterations. Their vertep boxes are usually made from a readily available material, and the puppets from cloth or paper. The family vertep theatres operate only during the winter school vacations. In line with tradition, these families take their theatres around, visiting their relations, friends and acquaintances to perform their shows, to sing their Christmas carols and entertain.

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Until recently there was an amateur group with the Leningrad Ethnography Institute led by the well-known folklore researcher Galina Shapovalova. Their repertoire included a folk-style production of the Petrushka show. The puppets were made by the artists themselves from readily available materials with help from an old man, who had not only seen genuine Petrushka shows during his childhood, which were usually played in backstreets or in the market-place, but also played the barrel organ for some of those performances. Using several authentic texts the group came up with their own version of the show, which they played for audiences made up mainly of college students, usually with great success. (ii) The emergence of professional groups oriented completely towards folk theatre tradition was not so straightforward. It can be a threat for them to reduce their level to amateurish, performing as they do on stages, which are absolutely contradictory to true art. Nevertheless, in 1989 an original Folk Theatre Studio, directed by Alexej Strelnikov, was formed in Leningrad. This studio performs vertep and Petrushka shows. The studio has united several groups playing the folk dramas King Maxmillian, The Boat and King Herod. To their younger audiences they offer game-shows, Christmas plays and a variety of funny stories, which they have revived either during folklore expeditions, or by rummaging through archives. Professional folklorists, who usually act as both collectors and performers aim at educating their audiences using examples of authentic folk art, encouraging them to introduce them into their lifestyles. One of the goals of this association is to re-create and reproduce conditions which are most favourable for performing and enjoying traditional art. The folk puppet theatre is a theatre of the market-place, of the environment, of the audience rather than of the boxed stage. It suggests that the audience surrounds the stage, and needs an immediate actor-audience-actor response. Of course, the ability to sense the mood of the audience and respond to it, to be able to use it within the limits of a traditional play can take a long time to acquire. From this perspective both vertep and Petrushka shows are only making their first steps at present. They only imitate traditional performance, and this nontraditional functioning of the traditional theatre is a curious phenomenon. Folk puppeteers in the past never repeated their productions word-forword. Every performance had to be created anew. For all their efforts, today’s puppeteers cannot achieve this. And there is even a distortion in the case of the vertep theatre. Developing naturally, it tended to reduce the canonical religious part, while emphasizing the comedy section. Since the former allowed very little variation, it was recorded in great detail. The second part, which was far more liberal, was not of much interest to folklore researchers, and despite its great popularity with audiences, was not written down. It is quite easy today to restore the religious component, and almost impossible to reproduce the comedy part, not to speak of the King Herod productions. (iii) It is a very complicated process for professional artists to become involved in folk puppet theatre, and they tackle it, both theoretically and practically, from a historical perspective. Knowing quite well that the Soviet puppet theatre was set up at a time when other market-place entertainment and religious folk theatre was denied, an innovative producer must realize that the time has come to give up today’s vantage point of historical perspective and to return to old forms, previously neglected or ignored. This can lead to a

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new type of theatre, regaining its previous richness and being able to look to the future too. A micro-festival held in Leningrad in the spring of 1988 to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the Institute of Theatre, Cinema and Music has proven that to use folk tradition was both timely and fruitful. Two shows at the festival, Doctor Faustus and Petrushka by Mikhail Khusid, were beyond comparison. The producer is now working on a vertep performance with the students of the institute. He intends to progress, rather than return to old forms, and this is just his first lesson at the school of traditional art. Today it cannot be learned first-hand, and the only way is to find its roots on your own, to investigate and attempt to re-create it. And that is why the so-called “museum” productions take so long and are so elaborate. They are both the restoration workshop and the creative laboratory, where old forms are being revived and their secrets rediscovered. The following step would be to use the treasure of folklore to create a truly modern theatre. A different method is used by another Leningrad theatre, which is based in Vyborg, one of the Leningrad suburbs. For the producers of The Apricot Tree and The Household Theatre of the Nursemaid Arina theirs is the way to identify the structure of the theatre, learning the meaning of the basics of folk tradition, so that they can use them in their own work today. Both performances are based on folk stories and methods of performance. The Apricot Tree is a fairy tale narrated by actors who stroll with their puppets from village to village. The performance is very much like a true folk play, being a series of separate scenes, each one complete. This is emphasized by the actors who raise the puppets above their heads with triumphant exclamations at the end of each scene. In Petrushka the puppet and the living actor-musician coexist as inseparables. In The Apricot Tree the puppet and the actor appear as two incarnations of one and the same character. They can only be separated because they are one. In the folk traditionalistic view, quite paradoxically for today’s notions, there exists an amalgamation of apparently opposing things. The Vyborg company use this paradox precisely in its traditional understanding, but in today’s style. At one time the puppet appears to be the soul of the human actor, at others he is taken as the soul of the wooden puppet. This production is a good example of the masterly use of traditional methods and devices to reproduce the audience which plays an active part of the performance. Today’s audience is completely unprepared for this. In terms of the audiences of the past, they appear shy but tempestous if compared with normal theatre audiences today. In Vyborg the audience become excited, taking the twists of the story and the actors’ remarks with great delight. The main artistic device in The Household Theatre of the Nursemaid Arina is the puppeteer, who tells his story, helped by the puppets, before the very eyes of the audience. This specific, quite traditional performance, made by Lyudmila Savchuk, creates an unimaginable atmosphere, elated on one hand by the authority of tradition, and on the other by originality. A small company from the suburban township of Pushkin near Leningrad has become a main attraction now. Established by four artists, it is made up of children and their parents. Even its name, The Wooden Horse, has a charm of its own. The main thing about this theatre, as with that of Lyudmila Savchuk, is the company’s belief in making everything together. They do not often speak of someone being the author of this or that

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production, not because there is no such person, but rather because it does not matter much. This attitude as is also taken by folk theatre, where everything is done on a joint venture basis. The Wooden Horse approaches tradition from various angles. At present Vadim Kinovich is busy producing a vertep show, based on a text from the 1882 issue of the magazine The Kiev Old Times. And if Khusid, already mentioned above, begins with mastering old techniques to be able to use them in his principally new productions, this company does exactly the opposite. They use old folk-play tricks and devices to complete their productions. The theatre in Pushkin was the first to adopt the traditions of folk marionettes. In their production called Finist—the Bright-Eyed Falcon, like in the old folk theatres, a great deal of expression lies with the gesture rather than with the spoken word. Gestures become their principal expressive device, at times more meaningful than words. The puppets show that they are descended from old Russian market-place marionettes. Their chiselled and pointed faces seem to be able to alter their expressions. Elongated hands with enormous palms correspond to the importance of gestures in the show. The Pushkin company also presented the traditional Petrushka show. Its aim was not so much to learn the techniques of puppetry involved, rather to concentrate on the gameshow, i.e., improvization on given themes. Turning as they do towards folk heritage, the Leningrad puppeteers are fully aware that it would be impossible to restore the traditional theatre completely and that there is no need to do so in the first place. Their ultimate goal is not to imitate folk theatre, but to establish a kind of cultural dialogue with traditional forms, which is bound to produce tangible results, because it focuses at the meeting point of tradition and today’s experience and things that were once important take on new significance with their inner sense and surface meaning. Therefore, fresh approaches can shed new light on eternal problems.

Note 1. Russian vertep cavern, den: an early form of the puppet theatre. Contemporary Theatre Review, 1992, Vol. 1, 1 pp. 25–30 Photocopying permitted by licence only

© 1992 Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH Printed in the United Kingdom

Puppet Theatre in the Home in PreRevolutionary Russia Inna Solomonik Writer/historian

Puppet theatre in the home in pre-Revolutionary Russia is an interesting but insufficiently researched subject; it constitutes an important link in the evolution of puppet art, connecting traditional Russian theatre and modern-day professional Soviet theatre. The history of the Russian home puppet performances began in the late -eighteenth— early -ninteenth century, but the Russian folk theatre influenced it considerably later, at the end of the nineteenth century. Puppet shows were introduced into the life of Russian aristocracy under the influence of the West. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries puppet theatres enjoyed enormous popularity in most European countries. Puppet shows were presented not only at fairs but in royal palaces, at landowners’ balls, in moderately rich homes, and even in monasteries. In the nineteenth century, puppet shows were still popular but came to be regarded by most as children’s entertainment. In educated circles it was customary to invite a puppeteer to children’s parties or to stage an amateur puppet show themselves. This custom, like the whole of European culture and way of life, gradually penetrated Russian everyday life. Russian aunts and grandmothers brought dolls and puppets from their frequent trips abroad and helped their young nephews, nieces and grandchildren stage their own shows at home in the style of those they had seen abroad. Many foreigners lived in Russia at the time. Their social status varied greatly: from lackeys and valets to factory-owners, actors, scientists and noblemen in the servive of the Russian tsars. Tutors and instructors were particularly numerous. This was determined by the Russian system of education, in which the main emphasis was on mastering foreign languages. Virtually every wealthy family employed a foreign tutor. The lives of foreigners, who moved to Russia for various reasons, were closely interwoven with the lives of the Russian gentry, and thus many customs and traditions from other lands were introduced. So when an old French valet (like Callot who lived in Herzen’s home) made a Polichinelle for his young master; or when a grandmother (like Alexander Benois’ grandmother) brought marionettes from Venice; or a cousin (like N.Simonovich’s cousin) bought puppets in Paris, then the child immediately wanted to hold the puppet, make it move, talk on its behalf, and stage a puppet show. Mothers allowed their children to set up a stage in a corner of the drawing room or in a doorway, they also helped to write plays, make puppets, and costumes, or simply formed an attentive audience. This is probably how home puppet shows began in Russia. Several stages in the development of the pre-Revolutionary home puppet theatre can be identified. At each stage a certain type of home show was mastered. However, the evolution of the puppet theatre consisted not of a succession of different types but rather of a merging of styles. Each new type of show merged with the previous ones, so that the

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shows continually changed, becoming more varied, expressive and thematically wideranging. New plots and types of puppets appeared and new audiences and actors became involved. The first stage is the children’s puppet show without adult participation. The adults’ attitude is encouraging but passive, and their main role is that of an audience. This show is more like game, a performance in which children have complete freedom of action. The second type is a puppet show staged by adults for children. The adults’ role is more active and the initiative comes from them. The home puppet stage is used for education and instruction. A show’s aim is mainly educational. Children and adults change places so that the children become the audience and adults write and perform in the show. The third type is an adults’ show addressed to adults. The have theatre begins to touch on political and social topics, producing literary and drama classics. It attracts creative intelligentsia and becomes the centre of stage experiments, half-professional, studiotheatre in character. The first type of home puppet shows appeared at the turn of the nineteenth century, the second in the middle of the nineteenth century, and the third at the beginning of the twentieth century. Each stage was absorbed and further developed by the Soviet puppet theatre.

Home Shows as a Children’s Game In the 1820s, “games with marionettes” were already quite popular among children (P. Viskovaty). These games were played practically without adult involvement. Adults considered such games as educational for children and encouraged them in every way: little Misha Lermontov’s aunt sent him wax to make dolls; little Sasha Bestuzhev was allowed to borrow all the necessary tools and materials from his father’s factory; little Shuvinka Benois’ father ordered a miniature table theatre for his son; Leo Tolstoy invented a puppet hero for his little daughter Tanya. The repertoire for these performances consisted of plays composed by the children themselves. They featured their favourite literary heroes, impersonated their youthful idols, particularly those who worked in real theatre. At this stage children’s initiative was not restrained by adult interference. Children’s creativity was exercised in various fields: play-writing, invention of stage effects, play-acting, moulding of puppets, making costumes, fitting sets, painting scenery. Perhaps the amateur puppet group—a popular form of present-day artistic education—takes its roots in those children’s home shows.

Home Shows as a Means of Education Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, the influence of various educational theories became increasingly more widespread in Russia, more and more attention was given to children’s upbringing. Special periodicals to help parents raise children (Journal for Parents and Instructors, Family Evenings, etc.) appeared. Children’s literature also appeared at that time. Educational theories were reflected in the home puppet shows.

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Parents came to see them not merely as entertainment, a useful gave to pass the time, but as a means of educating the child, of influencing his “mind, heart and taste” (N.Pirogov). Adults’ roles became more active. They wrote plays, operated the puppets, and played the parts behind the screen. This type of puppet show was devoid of children’s improvization. It was based on a carefully contrived repertoire in which puppets were used as a teaching aids. Some memoirs contain reminiscences of the puppet show The Fall of Troy staged by the Postnikov family for their adolescent son who was studying ancient history. With the help of puppets the students of the Mariinsky Ballet School demonstrated ballet movements. The home puppet show becames a means of “sentimental education”, a lesson in morality. This method was used, among others, by Sofya Andreevna Tolstoy (Leo Tolstoy’s wife) to educate her children. The private puppet show introduced children to literature, music, theatre, and developed their artistic taste and figurative thinking. The famous ballerina Tamara Karsavina recalled how her father presented a puppet show of Pushkin’s Ruslan and Ludmila, and Evgenia Gnesian (a niece of the founders of the Moscow Music Institute named after the Gnesins) spoke of the puppet opera The Toy Ball produced for her at home. The European puppeteers hastened to profit by the new fashion in Russia and opened “puppet theatres for children”. One such theatre, opened in St Petersburg in the 1840s, was enthusiastically advertised by the newspaper Severnaya Pchela [Northern Bee]. The first Russian puppet plays started appearing in the press (the earliest of them was Fyodor Odoyevsky’s Tsar-maiden, 1841). By the end of the nineteenth century, when the cultural circles evinced interest in the folk puppet theatre, the Russian Petrushka (Punch) attracted parents’ attention. Folk puppeteers were invited to children’s parties, Christmas parties, balls and birthday parties. Some Petrushka-nielz specialized precisely in this style of Petrushka plays. Alexander Benois called them “Saeolz’s Petrushka”. The “Comedia of Petrushka penetrated aristocratic drawing-rooms and were inevitably adapted for that audiences’ tastes. The street puppeteers smoothed over the text of the comedy to make it fit for gentlefolks’ consumption. Thus the puppet show became part of the home education programme. Booklets were published carrying different “children’s” variants of Petruska, instructions for setting up little theatres and everything concerning manipulating marionettes”, as well as stage versions of fairy tales with instructions for staging them as puppet shows. Russian factory-owners started producing puppets for amateur shows, miniature puppet theatres made of cardboard with a set of puppets and stage sets for different plays. (Valentin Katayev recalls them in his Oberon’s Magic Horn.) Thus, in the second stage, in addition to the home game show, a show controlled by adults and consciously used for educational purposes evolved. This educational principle was further developed in the Soviet puppet theatre and became one of its mainstays.

Studio Shows At the beginning of the twentieth century the home puppet theatre became even more “adult-oriented”. Its repertoire went beyond purely educational purposes and touched on subjects of interest to adults. The precursor of this trend was Vassily Kurochkin’s comedy Prince Lutonya (published posthumously in 1880). During the Revolution of

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1905, Valentin Serov’s sons’ private theatre staged the sketches The Rout of Presnya and Art School on Strike. In the early years of the First World War, the director of the Alexandrinsky Theatre, N.Petrov, showed puppet parodies ridiculing such figures as Kaiser Wilhelm II and the Austrian emperor Franz-Joseph. Puppet theatre came to be seen as art for adults. The “growing up” of both the public and the actors is explained not only by the need to respond to political and social events in the world, to express one’s attitude towards them, but also by a whole range of other causes. These include the growing interest in folklore, and in the folk puppet shows in particular. Scholars studied them, recorded texts, reconstructed their history and offered various hypotheses of their origin. Intellectuals visited market puppet booths marvelling at their consummate art. The public is amused…not only by the witty text and turns of plot but also by the fact (and that is probably the main factor) that the puppets’ movements have so little in common with the real human movements one sees in actual life…. When a puppet cries, its hand, holding a handkerchief, does not touch the eyes; when a puppet kills, it stabs its adversary so gently that the sword barely touches its breast. The puppet world is the magic world of artistic invention and each character has very little to do with reality, while the stage where puppets move can be compared to a sounding board and the craftsmanship of the puppeteers to the strings. (Vsevolod Meyerhold) The folk theatre offered new possibilities of puppet art. A study of its history and acquaintance with its representatives inspired one with the desire to revive it, to master its “skilful stage devices” (N.Simonovich-Efimova). Another reason was the interest among the artistic and theatrical circles in puppetry as an art compared to the naturalistic art of the living actor. This was at a time when naturalism was no longer in demand, when it came to be associated with “petty bourgeois narrow-mindedness” (B.Rostotsky). “The main disease of the theatre in our days…is unnecessary complication of the artistic devices at the expense of the general idea…. The living body of the theatre has become infested with too many redundant details, a multitude of trivialities,” said Yu. Slonimskaya, expressing the opinion of many of her noted fellow-countryment. Directors, artists, musicians, poets and writers were looking for a way out of this naturalistic “blind alley”. Some searched for solutions in the past (e.g., many artists of The World of Art association, the founders of the “Old Theatre” who tried to revive old plays with their performing style; the puppeteers who produced The Power of Love and Magic). Others tried to discover new expressive means, new paths in art. Symbolism was one of the forms of protest against naturalism. It invaded all forms of art including drama, where it came into conflict with live acting and suggested the idea that a puppet was an ideal actor in the theatre of symbolism. This idea was first voiced by Gordon Craig. In Russia the same idea was put into practice by Andrei Bely who announced the launching of the first symbolic puppet theatre. The lasting influence of the West was another reason for the “growing up” of the puppet theatre. In the second half of the nineteenth century the artistic and literary circles

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of Europe were trying to create puppet theatre for adults: in France Maurice Sand’s theatre and Lemercier de Neuville’s theatre (performed paradies of famous people) and Signoret’s theatre (specializing in plays seldom produced in ordinary theatre); in Germany the theatre of Münich artists; in Austria Richard Teschner’s theatre (the first in Europe to work with rod puppets in the manner of Javanese wayang); to name a few. Attempts were made in various countries to set up or revive the declining folk puppet theatre. Societies of “Friends” of the puppet theatre appeared, such as the Society of Guignol’s Friends in France, the Society of Tehantch’s Friends in Belgium, and others. According to Vladimir Azov, at the beginning of the twentieth century “the wave of revived interest in puppetry finally reached Russia.” All the above-mentioned reasons led to the spread of amateur puppet studios, which appeared one after another but seldom managed to complete a production and show it to the public. This is how events developed chronologically. In 1907, Andrei Bely published an article on symbolic puppet theatre in the press. The artists S.Sudeikin and P.Drittenpreis undertook to realize his idea. It was decided to stage “a gnostic performance of the ancients and their rituals”. However no information was preserved about any such play and apparently the plan remained unrealized. In 1910, Vladimir Azov also made an attempt to set up a puppet theatre but nothing came of that either. In 1909–11, the Efimovs and Valentin Serov Lauched a small puppet studio in Paris. Only once did they manage to show their production to the public. The Efimovs used of their findings and artistic discoveries from those days in their professional work as puppeteers in Russia. In 1912, the artist L.Yakovleva and a group of her students tried to organize a puppet theatre in St Petersburg, but all to no avail. In 1914, N.Petrov presented his puppet sketches and was soon joined by a group of enthusiasts, and later by L.Yakovleva, V.Forschtedt (subsequently a professional actor with the Leningrad Puppet Theatre). Together, they intended to stage Gozzi’s Green Bird. Yakovleva translated the play from the Italian, and designed the costumes. They invited an amateur puppeteer to teach them puppet manipulation but the production was never completed because Petrov, who served with the Alexandrinsky Theatre at the time, quarrelled with his bosses and left the capital. In 1915, Evgeny Vakhtangov must have been thinking of producing a puppet show because we find sketches in his notebook of a puppet play in the manner of an Italian masque comedy. But these plans, too, remained only on paper. Stanislavsky also considered the puppet theatre: around 1916, he asked Alexei Tolstoy to write a puppet play in the style of Petrushka. But the plans were never realized. Yu. Slonimskaya and the Efimovs came closer than the others to creating a professional puppet theatre. Slonimskaya was commissioned to write an article on the history of the pantomime for the magazine Appolo. While collecting material for it she became fascinated with the history of the puppet theatre and decided to organize a puppet theatre specializing in old puppet plays. She carefully studied all the material connected with puppetry, went to Europe to study puppet theatres and museums there, and on returning to St Petersburg, she launched a puppet studio together with her husband P.Sazonov. For their première, they chose a French seventeenth-centuiry fair show, The Power of Love and Magic. The

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best actors and set designers of St Petersburg were engaged. They had their first night in February 1916. The play was shown several times and, according to reviews, was warmly received by the capital’s public. The studio did not have premises of their own and had to rely on the courtesy for their friends who let them use the drawing rooms in their houses. But the ice was broken—the puppet theatre was opened and gave performances, albeit not regularly. They were preparing a new play—a medieval French farce Advocate Patlin. At the same time Nikolai Gumilyov was writing his Gondla, a dramatic poem based on Scandinavian sages. However, that theatre was short-lived. After the Revolution of 1917, Slonimskaya and some of the studio members emigrated and the studio broke up. In the same years N.Simonovich-Efimova returned from Paris and began paving the way towards professional puppet theatre. First she showed short scenes in the houses of her friends. In 1916 she was invited to give a show at the Moscow Artists’ Club. She accepted the invitation and prepared a puppet version of Krylov’s fable The Hermit and the Bear. That was her first public appearance. It was a great success and brought her invitations to take part in paid concerts. The studios of Slonimskaya and Sazonov and the Efimovs’ performances in paid concerts provided a link between the pre-Revolutionary home puppet theatre and the Soviet professional puppet theatre. The home puppet theatre in its studio form came as near as can be towards professionalism. But it failed to cross the gap dividing the amateur and professional theatre, it was unable to reach a wide audience, launch regular shows, create the professional puppet theatre and “put it on the same footing with theatrical spectable in general” (N. Simonovich-Efimova). These aims were only realized by the Soviet puppet theatre after the Revolution when it changed the direction of its quests. However, it has inherited the educational principles and the cultural content of the house puppet theatre of pre-Revolutionary Russia. The first Soviet puppet theatres appeared in 1918 and were headed by former studio members: L Yakovleva-Shaporina in Petrograd, and the Efimovs in Moscow. Contemporary Theatre Review, 1992, Vol. 1,1 pp. 31–36 Photocopying permitted by licence only

© 1992 Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH Printed in the United Kingdom

The Artist’s Puppet Theatre Natalia Raitorovskaya Moscow Shadow Theatre, Moscow, USSR

It is true to say that no other form of theatre gives such prominence to the role of the artist as the puppet theatre, and that even the most amateur of puppeteers must have some artistic skills. This is even more important in professional puppet theatres in which each character and his stage environment is created by the set designer, the artist. Much can be said about the importance of the work the artist does for the theatre. The reverse is no less interesting; that is, what does the puppet theatre have to offer the artist? What makes it so attractive for the creative artist? The history of the puppet theatre, in both the West and Russia, is filled with examples of artists, even those who were not directly working on various stage productions, being fascinated by puppet theatre. There are many well-known names in this list: Picasso, Leger, Klee, the Russian Dobuzhinsky, Benois, Tyshler, Efimov, Favorsky, to name but a few. For some of them a brief romance turned into a life’s love. There then appeared a very special theatre, in which fine artistry reigned supreme—the artist’s theatre. Puppet theatre is an exciting subject for a student of the arts, being, as it were, a juxtaposition of two art forms—theatre and fine arts. It has its own history and principles. The history of this phenomenon in the Russian theatre will now be considered. In 1916, there was a minor theatrical event in Petrograd, which came to be viewed as a turning point in the history of Russian theatre art: the first Russian marionette theatre was opened in the home of an artist named Gaush. It was even more important because up until that time there was no distinction between the various forms of the puppet genre. Russian audiences had to accept the monotony of Petrushka performances at fairs, an occasional tout by a puppeteer from the West, shows with half-mechanical contrivances for puppets, and household puppet theatres. On the whole, puppet theatre was looked down on, taken with a pinch of salt, as entertainment suitable only for children and simple-minded people. The opening of a marionette theatre was most unexpected, not only because it was the first Russian marionette company, but also because it represented scenic art at its best. Even nowadays it is overwhelming to see the familiar names of those who were involved in that debut. The artists Dobuzhinsky and Kalmakov designed the scenery; the musical score was written by the composer Gartman, and performed by a top Russian string quartet; the famous ballet dancer Neslukhovskaya was responsible for the choreography; the outstanding opera singers Zoya Lodiy and Nikolai Alekseev, and actors from the Aleksandrinsky Theatre were all involved. In the audience were the director Vsevolod Meyerhold and the famed poet Alexander Blok. A detailed newspaper article about the performance was written by artist and art historian Alexander Benois.

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Indeed, the names mentioned above were very famous in Russian art history at the beginning of this century. Most of them were directly or indirectly involved in the activities of the association known as Mir Iskusstva [The World of Art]. It was in this society that the idea of a Russian marionette theatre was conceived. It is still to be seen whether the concepts and goals of Mir Iskusstva can shed some light on the mysterious affection that first-rate artists had for the shabby stage of the puppet theatre. Artists representing very different schools and styles of painting were brought together in The World of Art society. The common idea they shared that kept them enraptured is reflected in the name they gave to their society. That idea was their reasoning that art, as a value in itself, was a separate world, completely autonomous and unrelated to man’s humdrum existence. That world developed according to its own laws, it existed independently of human life, it had its own history. Hence the importance its members attributed to studying historical and artistic styles and aesthetic systems. The puppet theatre appealed to their philosophical and aesthetic outlook. It was seen as a comprehensive artistic system, the life of each of its components being artificial. They believed that it had a charm of its own, an artificiality which was not static or lifeless, but dynamic and bubbling with life. The World of Art had its theoreticians who described the puppet theatre as a miniature world where every detail was formally unreal, but in actuality, lived a mysterious life of its own. There was also a noteworthy episode before the first puppet show began. The audience was offered a brief prologue: a marionette dressed as a seventeenth century lady, appeared on stage and spoke about the puppet theatre. She told a story about the first puppets, when and where they came to be, and why poets and philosophers appreciated them so much. About why the puppets are so fond of playing Aristophanes and Shakespeare. The marionette stretched out her beringed hands and told the audience about the souls that wooden puppets have, and that the strings ere actually their nerves, stretched and sparkling. She had just one request—she asked the audience to love the marionettes. The artists in Mir Iskusstva called the puppet “the quintessence of the human being”. Of course, this was not a new idea; it had been with the puppet theatre since time immemorial. True, society members were interested in more than just a puppet. They attempted to expose the aesthetic quality of every type of theatre puppet. Thus, the glove puppet, frolicking on the actor’s hand, was taken by them as a symbol of passion, a sinful element. The marionette, worked from above, was for them a symbol of obedience and dependence on the heavenly origins of the human being. In the interplay of these two sources there lies the essence of the tragic and comical history of mankind, which the puppet theatre expresses by using ingeniously simple means. Perhaps the best illustration of of The World of Art’s idea was the ballet Petrushka designed by Igor Stravinsky and the artist Alexander Benois. Apart from the philosophical and aesthetic content of the idea of the puppet theatre, so fruitful for artistic creativity, the members of The World of Art were attracted by very practical things. One of these was the ability to express themselves fully using their chosen style in the puppet theatre. If you are acquainted with the work of Dobuzhinsky and Benois, you must remember that their favorite style was seventeenth-century baroque. Their graphic works are filled with images of residents of the Versaille palace and of the suite of Elizabeth, of ladies

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and cavaliers, pages, dwarfs, all looking as if they had frozen just before making their next step—or “pas”—in a minuet. It is not the character of the people he portrays that the artist is after, but rather various attributes of the epoch—their clothes, hairstyles and various accessories. It was by combining all these elements that the artist achieved his favourite style. The marionette theatre gave them a welcome opportunity to make that graphic live. For the debut performance the company chose a seventeenth-century comedy called The Powers of Love and Magic. Dobuzhinsky plunged into work with delight. The artist Kalmakov made sketches of the puppets, while Dobuzhinsky sketched the set and the puppet in the prologue, described above. Already a famous artist, a master Dobuzhinsky became a master of puppets. I would like to relate a funny episode about this. Once, while Dobuzhinsky was sitting painting the soles of the shoes of his marionette, the producer of the show, who was passing by, told him: “Isn’t it a waste? The audience won’t even see the soles of the shoes of this marionette.” The artist answered: “But I will, won’t I?” Of course it is hard to tell which of Dobuzhinsky’s qualities comes to the fore in this story—his artistic meticulousness, or his respect for wooden actors. The show itself was very spectacular. There was so much included in it—from the magic kingdom of a wizard, inhabited by monsters, to knights’ tournaments. There were marquises, couples in love, pastoral scenes and even flying gods’ chariots. The contemporary critics note the extreme artistry of that production. Some even compared it to an ancient tapestry. Euphoric after their success, the production team then plunged into their next production—a French comedy called Maestro Pattelline. Dobuzhinsky began working on the sketches. Unfortunately, the 1916 production of The Powers of Love and Magic was the one and only for that marionette theatre. After the 1917 Socialist Revolution the theatre ceased to exist. The majority of the people who founded it emigrated. Nevertheless, the idea of a puppet theatre as a self-important work of art, which exists independently never ceases to be attractive to artists. I would also like to mention that after the Revolution the first Soviet puppet theatres were not set up by actors and producers, but mainly by artists. One of these, the First State Marionette Theatre in Leningrad was set up by a group of graduates of the Academy of Arts. In Moscow after the 1917 Socialist Revolution a mobile puppet theatre appeared, which belonged to a family of artists—the Efimovs. This deserves to be described in more detail. Professor Ivan Efimov was a well-known sculptor, graphic artist and animal painter. His wife Nina Simanovich-Efimova was a portrait painter. The puppet theatre appealed to them because it was possible to give life to their moving pictures. Flat shadow puppets made from plastic graphic silhouettes came to life. They treated round puppets as moving sculptures. Apart from the shadow theatre, the Efimovs had a set of glove puppets that was their genuine love. They worked a great deal on modernizing their mechanical design, seeking to give the puppets unrestrained and expressive gestures. With the glove puppet as a basis, the Efimovs came up with their own invention—a Java-type string puppet, with strings inside the body. Nina Efimova had it patented, and their invention was then widely used by puppeteers.

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In their mobile theatre the Efimovs staged the folk comedy Petrushka. They performed it with pleasure and fervour. They also staged works by the Russian classics— Pushkin Gogol and Krylov. Their final production, undertaken in 1930, was none other than Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The Macbeth puppets are still kept in the museum at the Obraztsov theatre. Art critics regard these puppets as truly wonderful examples of the original “rag” sculpture. The puppet theatre became a life’s work of the artist Nina Efimova-Simanovich. She was engrossed in its history, and she wrote The Notes of a Glove-Puppeteer, a large and exciting book. In it she concentrated on issues ranging from the origin of the puppet theatre to the way it differed from drama theatre. She described the puppet’s do’s and don’ts, and the demands it makes. Even the most casual reader cannot help noticing that all the author’s reflections concerning the stage aptitude of this theatre boil down to one thing—the puppet. Simanovich-Efimova seems to forget about the actor and the producer. This is the distinguishing feature of what I, and many before me call the artist’s theatre, possessed by both the artist’s of The World of Art and the Efimovs. They regarded the puppet as a work of fine art, which has a character and a style of its own even before it appears on the stage. In this situation the actor is left only the role of demonstrating that work of art. There is hardly anything he can add to the puppet’s perfection. The actor only has to skilfully introduce the puppet to the audience. Is there anything really surprising about my calling the puppet the central figure of the puppet theatre? It is only natural. But nevertheless, that idea was at one time invalidated when Sergei Obraztsov spoke out against it. It should be noted that Obraztsov was also a student of fine arts, a welleducated artist. But despite his support for the laws of The Big Stage he put forward his own view of the theatrical puppet. The Obraztsov concept was pivotal to what came to be viewed as an almost historical reform in the puppet theatre in Soviet time. Obraztsov argued that the puppet theatre is first and foremost a theatre. The main figure in drama theatre is the actor, while the actor and the puppet combine to form the principal character in the puppet theatre. The distinguishing feature of the actor manipulating the marionette is that in creating a drama character he lets it pass through his own, and the puppet’s, self. That’s why the puppet has to be ready for all kind of transformations. The puppet as a complete work of art is of no use to the theatre. Its completeness, stylistic determination and the unmoving countenance all restrict the play, giving no possibility for improvization. For Obraztsov’s theatre a completely new puppet was needed—a half-finished puppet. What may be taken as a classical example of this type of puppet is used in one of Obraztsov’s plays. Gloves on his hands, he has balls on the index fingers which denote two heads. Each of the balls has only one element to suggest a face. A vertical rectangular block for a nose—that’s “her,” a horizontal block means “him.” From the viewpoint of sculpture, these balls have no value whatsoever. But, from a theatrical perspective, it is a lyrical duo, a remarkably live stage image. The new concept of the theatrical puppet needed a new type of artist. He did not have to be a professional sculptor, graphic artist or painter. He had to be a very special artist— one capable of guessing the twists and turns in what would be going on on-stage, rather than imposing on the actor a finished variant of the character. Such an artist had to be

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able to provide a rough sketch of the would-be character of the puppet from his artistic vantage point. For many years there was such an artist at the Obraztsoy theatre—Boris Tuzlukov. It was largely thanks to the productions he designed that the creative “ego” of the theatre became real, an exclusively peculiar “credo” that made the Obraztsov theatre famous the world over. In its time, the Obraztsov theatre had a huge impact on puppeteers. Many large and small theatres were set up following Obraztsov’s system. A special school of puppet theatre, known as the Soviet school, was formed, which lead to world for many years. Many things have changed since that time in the Soviet puppet theatre. New theatres have been opened, and there are many new names—producers, artists, actors. To theatre studies has been added a special section for studying the history and the theory of the puppet theatre. The essence and the guiding principle of this theatre have been reconsidered by both theoreticians and those who practise the puppet theatre. It would be hard to even roughly described the situation that exists today in the puppet theatre’s stage design. Almost every production offers a special design, so it would be difficult to talk about common directions in them. Nevertheless, I would like to note that the ideas advocated by The World of Art in the beginning of the twentieth century are still very popular with present-day puppeteers. At the same time, the notion of the puppet as a work of art in its own right has been widened, and it now embraces modern trends in the pictorial arts and the theatre. The term “puppet” now includes notions like “object,” “matter,” “artistic metaphor,” “the instrument of the art form,” and so on. The perception of the puppet theatre as a separate would where “the miracle of matter that becomes alive” happens is, for many artists, a focal point whereby they concentrate on the significance of form. Nowadays, artists from the Soviet Baltic republics appear to be the most active in continuing this trend. Vitalis Mazuras from Lithuania, is one such artist. Employing his masterly command of decorative art techniques, Mazuras creates a complex world of the material environment. There is practically no puppet he has made where he relies on traditional ways of depicting a character. For each and every one, he finds a new way, a new artistic metaphor. He is especially fond of working with materials of various textures. A block of wood, a piece of metal, a scrap of newspaper or straw matting, can all become the “soul” of his puppets. He tries to expose the inner meaning of matter and form and make them work in his productions. He is not any producer’s artist, so complete and so original is the artistic world he creates. Productions, in which he is both the artist and the producer are his best. It may be true that it was exactly this kind of theatre that artists only dreamed about at the beginning of this century, seeing in the puppet theatre a chance to create the world of artistic style, “the kingdom of the artist”. Many interesting scenographic discoveries have been made in the Soviet puppet theatre in connection with what is referred to as “the third genre”. This concept depicts a certain stage between the drama and the puppet theatres. In “third genre” productions both actors and puppets are on the stage as equal partners. The actor in such a production goes out on the stage to have a dialogue with the puppet, rather than only formally manipulate it.

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This approach means that the artist must take into account “big” stage designs. Mask puppets, costume puppets, and mannequin puppets have appeared. At the beginning I said that well-known names from the world of fine arts were interested in the puppet theatre. It was they who helped the puppet theatre to assert its dignity, to re-examine itself from a different angle. Puppet theatre has now changed, becoming a true artistic theatrical form. It is interesting to mention here, that nowadays our architects exhibit interest in the puppet theatre. Another unpredictable change may be lying in store for the puppet, and we could all become witness to some new theatre soon. Contemporary Theatre Review, 1992, Vol. 1, 1 pp. 37–40 Photocopying permitted by licence only

© 1992 Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH Printed in the United Kingdom

The Oriental Roots of Soviet Rod Puppets Inna Solomonik State Central Puppet Theatre Museum, Moscow

The rod puppet is firmly established in Soviet puppet theatres. Its direct predecessors first appeared in Russia in the early 1920s in the theatre run by Nina Simonovich-Efimova and Ivan Efimov. Above the screen of their theatre the fable-writer Krylov “leaned” on a stick, and the witch Baba-Yaga “flew” on her broom. These puppet’s heads were supported on actors’ fingers, as was the case with Petroushka, and gestures were conveyed by means of a stick or a broom which served as a rod. But soon (in 1930) the Efimovs presented scenes from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, in which the charactors gesticulated freely using both hands. In 1939 the rod was taken up by the State Central Puppet Theatre, which hitherto had followed the technique of Russian folk puppeteers, i.e. with glove puppets and string puppets (a string-puppet group worked in the theatre from 1934 to 1939). In Travels of Strange Countries1 alongside the glove puppets there appeared the first characters whose gestures were articulated with the help of the rod. Nina Efimova was the consultant who helped in puppet making. The puppets that appeared in the Travels, like the characters in Macbeth, had both hands manipulated by rods. The rods were fastened to the elbow joints, just as in Macbeth, and were masked either with a cloak or a piece of the cloth matching the puppet’s costume. But unlike the Efimov puppets they had a third rod which manipulated the head. The introduction of the rod enabled the puppeteers to use more varied and expressive gestures, and opened up great possibilities for experiment, and broadened the framework of dramaturgy. During the next year, 1940, Aladdin and His Magic Lamp2 a production based on the rod system highly perfected and improved, was added to the repertoire of the Central Puppet Theatre. The puppets in Aladdin had rods at the wrists rather than at the elbows, making their gestures more flexible and expressive. The production’s great success determined the the future of the Central Puppet Theatre: from now on the adult theatre-goer was attracted, and the rod became the basic instrument of puppet manipulation. Under the influence of the Central Puppet Theatre the rod was adopted by otherSoviet puppet theatres and later, in postwar years, by the puppeteers from other European countries. In its further development the rod gradually lost all disguise, all attempts to mask or hide it, and was now used openly. Some hold the view that the idea of puppet manipulation with the help of a rod originated in the Efimov theatre. However, this is not true. The deeper we delve into the history of puppets, the more complete our knowledge of the puppet theatres of the world, the clearer it becomes that the origins of this method of manipulation are to be found in the East. The rod puppet is known in China, India, Indonesia and some other Asian countries. If one carefully studies the history of the puppet theatre, one will be able to follow the path of the ancient oriental rod puppet to the modern theatre.

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The oriental puppets based on the rod system seem to have reached Europe as early as the nineteenth century. The puppets from Java—“wayang”—made of parchment or wood, were most common. They attracted travellers and collectors with their delicate and intricate carving or sculpture shape, and scholars were attracted to them by the exceptional role the theatre played in Javanese society. The wayangs had three rods: one that ran through the body of the puppet and two others attached to the hands of the figure. The long arms of the wayangs, with hinges at the shoulder and the elbow, made their gestures very beautiful and expressive. Most Europeans who visited exotic Java took these puppets “with their exotic, mysterious beauty”, in the words of Nina Efimova (1925), away with them. By the end of the nineteenth century a considerable number of private individuals and state institutions in Europe owned some of these figures. There were extensive wayang collections in Holland, England and Germany. Collections of wayangs found their way to Russia too. As early as 1868 the Rumyantsev Museum in Moscow acquired over one hundred of these figures, and small groups of wayangs found their way to the present-day Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography in Leningrad in 1885, 1894 and 1910. Yulia Slonimskaya, a St Petersburg art historian who worked for the art magazine Apollo, possessed a collection of Javanese puppets, as did some collectors in Moscow, and Nina Efimova mentions in her book that she saw an ancient puppet of this kind in a private house. (Efimova, 1925). Among the intellectual especially artistic circles of Europe the Javanese puppets were well known; much was written about them (see the articles and descriptions by leading figures in the English and German theatres, Craig [1913], and Hagemann [1921], by the Russian diplomat Bakunin [1902], by Professor V.Arnoldy [1911] of the Kharkov University, and others. Frequently puppet theatres were set up by these artistic circles, and puppet productions were put on. At one such theatre, founded by Richard Teschner, an Austrian artist, a production was presented in 1912, in which the puppets were made in the style of Javanese wayang figures. In 1911, Teschner visited Holland. In museums there he saw Javanese puppetscollections of the wayangs in this country are abundant and first class. These puppets left such a deep impression on Teschner, that after he returned to his own country he staged a production in the style of the Javanese theatre, using the plot of a traditional Javanese play and constructing puppets manipulated by three rods. But neither this production nor Teschner’s subsequent activities exerted a significant influence on the general progress of the European puppet theatre as far as the technique of puppet manipulation was concerned. Teschner had no followers. His rod puppets were the result of a direct, purely formal borrowing, a precise imitation of the Javanese puppets, and they did not take on in Europe. For the next two decades or so the European puppet theatre followed its own traditional principles of puppet manipulation until the Efimov theatre appeared. The Efimovs began working with glove puppets, made in the style of the puppets used by Russian Petrushka folk puppeteers. They had not heard about Teschner, and they were unaware of the Javanese puppets. As long as they dealt with traditional Petrushka and his similarly traditional partners there was no need for changes in the technique of puppet manipulation or in the puppets themselves. But fairly soon the Efimovs enlarged their repertoire, adding Russian folk themes, Krylov’s fables and modern sketches. At once they saw their glove puppets were limited to the traditional comedy: beyond the framework of slapstick they looked expressionless and their technical possibilities were few. “All they are fit for is to hold a stick under the arm and rain blows with it,” wrote

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Nina Efimova (1925) in disappointment. How could they depict the fairytale Baba-Yaga, convey the images of the crane or the wolf from the fables, make the figures of Granddad Krylov, the fabulist, not comical but imposing? If you take into account that Ivan Efimov was a animal sculptor and Nina Efimova a good portrait artist than it could be easily imagined that they strove to portray their characters in a most realistic manner, and made the proportions of the puppets close to the natural forms of people and animals. Glove puppets were no good for that. And so, early in the 1920s, the Efimovs devised a method which brought them close to the theatre of the rod puppet: they withdrew their fingers from the arms of the glove puppet, and lengthened the arms of their characters to coincide with the natural proportions of a human being. To prevent these dummy arms looking lifeless they were attached to a rod, the lower end of which hung below the screen and enabled the puppeteers to manipulate the puppet’s arms. This was the way Granddad Krylov walked about, leaning on a stick (his second arm was sewn to his overcoat; this was the way Baba-Yaga flew, holding her broom in both hands. These were not rod puppets in the true sense of the word (their heads were still supported or the puppeteers’ finger, their gestures were limited by the function of the object the puppet was holding, and the rod had not ye become a purely technical element). But the principle of rod manipulation had been “discovered”. So when the Efimovs came acros Javanese figures the encounter left a no less powerful impression on them than on Teschner. “I saw an ancient puppet of just this system, only the sticks manipulating the hands were not masked, presumably because it was not necessary for the story. Apparantly it is a Javanese puppet made of gilded wood and with an impressive, mysterious beauty—no, more than that—power—at once sharply contrasted to the character of our puppets,” wrote Nina Efimova (1925), comparing a Javanese puppet with the Granddad Krylov and Baba-Yaga puppets. The Efimovs mastered the oriental technique irnmediately. In the next year, 1926, their theatre had its first characters for the future production of Macbeth—Macbeth, Lady Macbeth and Macduff—the first true rod puppets (Efimov, 1964). In this way, though the rod was to a certain degree a spontanious phenomenon in the Efimov theatre, one cannot deny the influence of oriental puppets on their work. (this is clearly proved by a chronological comparison of the historical facts). However, in contrast to Teschner, the Efimovs’ rod puppets were not a direct transplantation of the oriental technique. Such a claim would be a crude simplification. The rod puppets that appeard in Macbeth were a result of a complex synthesis of the Efimovs’ own experience and of the deep impressions left by the oriental wayangs. If the Efimovs had not invented Granddad Krylov and Baba-Yaga prior to their encounter with the Javanese puppets, the oriental technique of manipulation very possibly would not have found any application in their puppets. The mastering of the oriental rod in this case was not a mechanical copying, but a creative process, a characteristic features of which was the selective interest in the borrowed material, and its reinterpretation (reworking). This can be seen in a number of specific features in which the Efimovs’ puppets differ from the oriental ones. Firstly, the Efimovs did not have a third rod for head manipulation—the head of the puppet remained attached to the finger of the puppeteer. Secondly, having been brought up on the European traditions of the puppet theatre, in which the actor and the technique of puppet manipulation are hidden from the audience, they did not accept the openly exposed rods of the Javanese puppets. Nina Efimova was so unprepared for the oriental

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method of puppet manipulation that she attempted to explain the undisguised presence of the rods by their “lack of necessity according to the theme”. Manipulating their puppets, the Efimovs hid the rods carefully in the folds of the puppets’ costumes, and to mask the technique of manipulation they moved the rods from the wrist, where they are fixed on the Javanese puppet, to the elbow joint. In this way the gestures of the Efimovs’ puppets lost some of the flexibility of the hands of the wayangs but the rod was well hidden from the audience. The Efimovs’ Macbeth left a deep impression on Soviet puppeteers. The first USSR Conference of Soviet Puppet Theatres was held in Moscow in 1930 Nina Efimova read a paper on the rod puppet. The audience was shown a few scenes from Macbeth. The new people who had joined the young Soviet puppet theatre and were not bound by traditional rules and customs, and the new repertoire that they had to create proved to be a good foundation on which the techniques of the rod puppet thrived. Under the influence of the Efimovs a number of Soviet puppet theatres tried their hand at the new techniques (N.Bezzoubtsev in the Voronezh puppet theatre, S.Malinovskaya in the Red Petrouchka Theatre in Moscow, and a few others). The Efimov’s rod puppet, as mentioned above, was adopted by the State Central Puppet Theatre. Here it experienced a second wave of oriental influence. A major role was played A.Fedotov, museum director of the Central Puppet Theatre, who paid great attention to history and especially to puppet techniques. In the theatre workshops the Efimov puppets acquired a thrid rod to manipulate the head (the Javanese term word “gapit” was adopted for it), and the two other rods were from then on attached to the wrists of the puppet, a move that restored the expressive gesture of its Javanese predecessors. This was the path that lead the ancient oriental rod puppet to the modern theatre.

Notes 1. A play by V.Polyakov, scenery by b. Tuzlukov, puppets by V.Terekhova, directed by S.Obraztsov and S.Preobrazhensky. 2. A play by N.Gernet, scenery and puppets by B.Tuzlukov, directed by S.Obraztsov and O.Ushakova.

References Arnoldy, V. (1911) Bakunin, M. (1902) Craig, G. (1913) Javanese Marionettes or Wayang Figures. The Mask Journal of Theatre. Florence: G. Craig. Efimov, A. (1964) Macbeth in the Efimov’s Puppet Theatre. p. 3. Moscow: Central Puppet Theatre Archives. Efimova, N. (1925) Adventures of a Russian Puppet Theatre. Michigan: Paul McPharlin. Hagemann, C. (1921) Spiele der Volker. Berlin Contemporary Theatre Review, 1992, Vol. 1, 1 pp. 41–48 Photocopying permitted by licence only

© 1992 Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH Printed in the United Kingdom

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Figure 1 Programme cover and details from the Leningrad Puppet Theatre of Fairy Tales’ (Skazka’s) production of The Green Blood. 1989

Figure 2 Skazka’s production of The Green Blood. Stage set, marionettes and performers -front view.

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Figure 3 Skazka’s production of The Green Blood. A view from the bridge showing the puppet manipulators in full view of the audience.

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Figure 4 Small-scale marionettes (18 inches high) from Skazka’s production of The Green Blood by J.B.Priestley.

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Figure 5 Small-scale marionettes (18 inches high) from Skazka’s production of The Green Blood by J.B.Priestley.

Figure 6 The Green Blood, designed by Nelly Polyakova. A typical combination of actors and puppets for children’s theatre.

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Figure 7 The Leningrad Puppet Theatre Studio’s In Man All Should Be by Anton Chekhov (Glasgow, November 1989). Songs by the Leningrad Puppet Theatre Studio

The body was falling freely, Flying down Without initial velocity. Hmph! Some time after The beginning of the fall, The body was at a height Of one thousand, one hundred metres; And still later, There was between the body and the surface of the earth, One thousand and twenty metres. Discover what was the initial height From which the body started flying down? Falling freely. Hmph! From which height, which height

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The body’s fallen down, fallen down… The Anniversary The body’s sliding down, From a sloping board without friction. Sliding, sliding down. Discover the angle of this inclination to the horizon! If the velocity of the sliding Of the body during the first second, Is two five-hundredths of a metre per second Less than the average. Velocity of the slide of the body? Find the angle of inclination Of the board to the horizon. The Proposal The body with “M" mass The body with “M" mass— Moves up along the wall Under the action of force “f” The force “f” is channelled The force “f” is channelled— At the angle “a” To the vertical. Find the acceleration of the body Find the acceleration of the body— Neglect the coefficient of friction!

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Figure 8 The Leningrad Puppet Theatre Studio’s In Man All Should Be, three farces (The Bear, The Wedding and The Proposal) by Anton Chekhov. Bunraku style of operation (two unmasked operators per puppet).

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Figure 9 The Lenigrad Puppet Theatre Studio’s Escurial by Michel de Ghelderode. A studio production with figures adopted from Bunraku-style puppetry.

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Figure 10 Skazka’s production of Magician of the Emerald City.

Figure 11 Skazka’s production of Magician of the Emerald City.

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Figure 12 Skazka’s production of The Hump-backed Horse. Contemporary Theatre Review, 1992, Vol. 1, 1 pp. 49–54 Photocopying permitted by licence only

© 1992 Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH Printed in the United Kingdom

The State Puppet Theatre of Fairy Tales Georgi Turayev Soviet Culture Fund

It was a dark and difficult time when the State Leningrad Puppet Theatre of Fairy Tales first saw the light of day. It was in 1944, the fourth year of World War II, when the siege of Leningrad was almost over—the siege that had Leningrad strangled in its iron grip for nearly three years. There were children in Leningrad: the scanty few who survived the siege, having witnessed events more terrifying than nightmares. These children never smiled. Three Leningrad actresses, who had returned home from the front before the siege and lived through the hell of the siege, then decided to set up a theatre for those children—a puppet theatre of fairy tales. They thought that fairy tales were what those children, who had been robbed of their childhood, needed the most. It is evident that fairy tales are chiefly sentiment-oriented. Knowledge of related things comes from this perspective—from the appreciation of an imaginary situation and characters, from an emotion awakened by a fairy tale. The Theatre of Fairy Tales set out from its very first day to communicate with children using the language of emotions and illusions. That is why the three women who created their theatre called it the Theatre of Fairy Tales. The idea of opening a puppet theatre in Leningrad was very appealing to both local authorities and the pedagogical community. So, in a short time one of the founders of the new company, Ekaterina Cherniyak, became the theatre’s artistic director, another Elena Gilody, became its producer, and the third, Olga Liandsberg, became its first actress. The new theatre had little time to mature, and so it plunged straight into its work. The veteran Leningrad puppeteer Yulia Shaporina presented them with a screen, and they had to find everything for their productions on their own, bringing odds and ends from their homes, buying this and that with their own money. They also had to do everything with their own hands—they sewed, designed the set, wrote their plays, worked out decorations. They had to learn how to manipulate the puppets, as well as many other things. After all this they announced their first performance on 31 December 1944. The first organization to give the new company shelter was the Leningrad Palace of Pioneers and School Students. It was a room in one of the buildings of the palace. Relying on less than adequate means, the theatre slowly began to grow, adding just one new play to their repertoire every year. As luck would have it, in their first year as a theatre the three actresses were assisted by many gifted artists. Among them were the painter Liandsberg, the sculptor Konstantinovskaya, and the actor Turayev, who was the company’s manager for twentysix years. In 1948 there were six actors in the theatre, including Elena Cherniak, who was then occupying two chairs, being both manager and actress. Their repertoire at that time

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included Russian and Western fairy tales, with Elena Cherniak taking care of scenography. She was also the only playwright for the theatre for many years. Thanks to her insight, her plays were very populat with other Soviet companies, who knew that the theatre was surviving on very little money. Her plays usually had few characters, so it only took a few actors to produce them, and scenery was very simple. These considerations were decisive for many puppet theatres as far as selection of their material was concerned. The Fairy Tale Theatre was very popular with children, who loved the shows, and they got a favourable response from critics and the pedagogic community alike. As time went on, children’s theatres and puppet companies began to receive subsidies from the state, so they could afford to plan new productions. In 1956 the Leningrad Puppet Theatre of Fairy-Tales was included in the list of state theatres. It also received the first home of its own, not a permanent residence, but a small cosy apartment in downtown Leningrad. Meanwhile, their audiences became different: boisterous, lively, unaware of the terrors of war, quite accustomed to children’s programmes on the radio, in cinema, circus, drama theatre and, rarely in those days, on television. This type of audience now needed something different from the puppet theatre. At that time in Leningrad there were two more professional (and several amateur) puppet theatres. As in other parts of the world, puppet theatre was booming. So there was a search for new forms, which resulted in some forms becoming crazes (such as the “black theatre”, masks, the shadow theatre, etc). There was also more contact between Soviet and Western puppeteers. At that time it was necessary for the theatre practitioners to reconsider their previous philosophy. They had to rethink the ways in which they selected their material, diversity their approaches to their repertoire, produce an impact on their teenage audiences. In 1961 Elena Gilody and Elena Cherniak left the company. Later that very year I was offered the post of the theatre’s managing director. That was when Alexander Nikolayev appeared in our theatre. He had gained experience as a director of childrer’s theatres. There were already twenty-five people in the company at that time. Well-educated, aspiring young actors, who graduated from the Leningrad Institute of Theatre, Music and Cinema, joined the experience “old-timers” to produce a much stronger collective. Indeed, it was a good company to work with. The new hands—the new leaders and the manager—began by searching for plays of greater literary merit. The theatre’s posters now featured the names of well-known Soviet writers and playwrights—Veniamin Kaverin, Evgeny Schwartz, Yuri Olesha, German Matveev, Vladimir Volkov, and others. At the Moscow Festival of Puppet Theatres in 1962, the Leningrad theatre showed two performances, both based on Veniamin Kaverin’s fairy tales. They were Tanya the Chatter-Box by Alexander Nikolayev with Arthur Liandsberg making the set, and The Tale of Mitya and Masha directed by Nikolayev again with the set designed by the artist Korotkov. Both productions received diplomas at the festival. The years 1965 to 1969 were hard for the Fairy Tale Theatre. For various reasons one director followed another, and each of them wanted different things from the company. But at last there appeared an artistic director who really belonged to the company. That was Yuri Eliseev, a merited artist of the Russian Federation. He was a born puppeteer,

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bright, keen on making others love what he loved in the puppet theatre, full of inventions. The theatre’s luck changed again. Yuri Eliseev invited Nelly Polyakova, his colleague at the Puppet Theatre in Gorky, to become chief artistic director of the company. Polyakova was a well-educated puppet theatre master She graduated from the Leningrad Institute of Theatre, Music and Cinema. Polyakova is an original, resourceful artist, well known for her approach to the usage of the space of the stage, her subtle penetration into the literary style of the plays she chooses, and her understanding of demands this style makes on the genre of the final stage production. The company’s very first productions showed how rich her fantasy could be, how inventive she was regarding the plasticity of the puppet, and how sophisticated she was in using the widest possible range of colours in her work. Critics noted of her refined taste, and her ability to offer an unusual spatial design of her productions of The Inquisitive Magician by Lopukhin and Novatsky, based on the fairy tale by Karel Kapek; and The Tinderbox, produced by Evgeny Speransky, using the famous fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen. In 1971 the theatre went to Moscow to show three new productions: the above mentioned The Inquisitive Magician, Alyonooshka and the Soldier by Lifshitz and Kichanova, and The Queen Frog by Nina Gernet. Everyone in the company was very agitated before that trip, so the success they enjoyed in Moscow was all the more pleasant for them. The Inquisitive Magician seems to have been the most successful of the three plays. The set designer used two very lightweight moveable screens, several colour blinds, and two or three other accessories to take the action from a fairy tale kingdom, to Spain, to Africa, to the far north, and then back to the strange kingdom again. Holding the puppets from above, male and female actors appeared in that play wearing short robes, making them look like integral parts of the puppet show, for example, in their work the “Sleuths.” Watching those absurd tall figures fussing about, firing their guns, or discussing something, you can not help laughing. As for the charismatic magician he needed no mask, and you could see his face which was decorated only with large spectacles. The actors, the puppets and the masks all talked to one another quite naturally and freely. The actors were harmoniously playing up to the grotesque happenings. They seemed to enjoy themselves in the company of the puppets, inventing together new adventures for the magician. Favourable press response and the attention Moscow theatre-goers gave the Leningrad company indicated that had they passed that test with flying colours. Everyone saw that they had been anything but idle in the previous decade. Having no permanent premises, working under the strain that constant touring puts on the theatre, working on stages where it was at times impossible to use all of their props and lighting equipment, the theatre emerged as a mature creative entity. Upon returning home, the company was back in the groove—eleven months a year of daily commuting from place to place in their bus with a trailer full of props, visiting schools and Pioneer Palaces, Culture Clubs, summer camps and kindergartens, playing for children of six to ten years of age.

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In the summer of 1972, the company made its debut tour abroad, taking The Inquisitive Magician and The Queen Frog to Yugoslavia. Since that time they have never lost touch with the Malo Pozorishte Puppet Theatre in Belgrade. In the same year the theatre took a chance on a children’s opera. The composer Boris Kravchenko, an old friend who wrote music for many of the company’s productions, wrote the book of the opera based on the complete text of Alexander Pushkin’s fairy tale About the Priest and His Servant Balda. The opera was titled What a Bloke, Balda! Pushkin wrote his fairy tale using the folk verse, the so-called “rayok”—a free conversational jocular verse with couplet rhyming. The style had been favoured in the past by strolling puppeteers. Rayok could also be heard at fairs and holidays in folk theatres. Boris Kravchenko wrote wonderful music, similar to folk music, which followed the simple and expressive style of Russian folk songs and dances. Both the producer and the set designer found a very precise stylistic solution: to make both actors and props look like the clay toys so popular with people in old Russia. The faces of the actors were hidden behind the masks made in the form of various items of pottery. Bright dress colours and the detailed set emphasized the cheerfulness of the Pushkin verse, and that of the music score. The actors had to develop specific gaits and mannerisms, and master strange dances invented for the figurines. As for the imps and devils, also characters in the Pushkin fairy tale, they were naive and funny-looking, identical to the devils on the lubok pictures of the past. Vocals were taped by professional opera singers. The actors themselves invented a special mouthpiece so the puppets could open their mouths in time to the music, leaving the actors’ hands free for gesticulation. This is what the Moscow-based magazine Musical Life wrote in 1971 about What a Bloke, Balda!: The Leningrad theatre of the fairy-tales…has in the past years become one of the most spectacular companies in this country. They never play it by the rules, each of their performances is a discovery. What we have seen this time is a well-balanced performance, prepared for children’s perception, well-thought-of from the general concept to the minutest details. I have to say that the company is constantly on the road. We invariably use the four metre-wide screen—to fit onto the stages at the schools where we perform. And the spirit moves us on. First of all, the company looks for new plays and novel stage methods. The theatre now co-writes the plays and is more deeply involved in evolving the repertoire. Quite unique in its approach to the selection of material, the theatre has been staging nothing but fairy tales for children. Fairy tales presented are by leading Soviet writers like Nikolai Pogodin (The Tale of the Beast Called Indrik), Palchinskaite (Wonders at the Museum), Gindin and Sinakevich (The Adventures of the Puppy Druzhok), Kozlov and Zhukhovitsky (I’ll Tell the World a Two). Fairy tales by classics of the Russian literature have been interpreted by the company, too, for example, The Hump-backed Horse, The Scarlet Flower, and The Queen Frog. They also perform plays based on fairy tales from Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Romania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Norway and Denmark.

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Their plays called Where Are You Running to, Little Colt? and The Adventures of the Puppy Druzhok remind one of the new relationship existing between literature and the puppet theatre, and the new horizons opening for it. It has been a popular notion to only give the puppet theatre credit for productions of simplistic fairy tales with happy endings (and that was indeed what the Leningrad theatre began with). But being part of the comprehensive theatre process, in the search for a new language, our theatre began to gravitate towards a metaphor, a symbol, much needed for disclosing the poetic nature of the fairy tale and theatre art itself. A prim-looking choir from an ancient tragedy…. Masks with their down-in-the-mouth expressions watching the steps trod of a colt, and comment on his movements. Its flight symbolizes a way of life. The actors raise two long bands of cloth, the upper for the sky, the lower for the road, while the colt begins to run. It is a tragic parable on the path one chooses in his life. “Where are you running to?” the choir asks. “I’m running after the horses!” The endless stretch of road is trembling. The road to the world of grown-ups is difficult, and it takes courage to follow it. “Bad weather is a must in this life!” the choir seems to be trying to comfort the colt. “Run, run away from an idle life of plenty, don’t be deceived by it. Keep on running, little colt, good luck!” Thus the theatre speaks about philosophical notions of Good, Evil, and the Art of Growing-Up. It keeps on talking, undaunted by tragic twists of fate. And in the final scene, giving the little colt shelter from the followers, all of a sudden the choir remove their masks. People join in the action, and as they pass the colt from one’s hands to another’s, taking him away from Evil, the actors seem to be opening the stage for the audience, making it relevant to today, summing up the “flight” of the colt. Directed by Rein Agur of Estonia, this production was given the gold medal at the Bulgarian Festival of Plays for the Puppet Theatre in Varna in 1981. The actor, the mask and the puppet exist side-by-side, organically combining in many theatre productions. They show the internal drama of the puppet theatre’s nature—the interplay of human being and puppet. This play may be amusing, or funny, or sad. The relationships between the actor and the puppet are also the content of the play The Adventures of the Puppy Druzhok. The producer Filshtinsky, the artist Polyakova and the composers Tsvetkov and Shepovalov tell a story about a dog who leaves the Granny deciding to be independent, hobody’s “dog from under the gate”. In this play the actors watch the show, joining in it to play various parts. Their distance, taking an outsider’s look, is a stylistic means used in this theatre puppet game. The theatre as a world of beauty can only be created by a professional company. Today there are twenty actors in the company, mostly graduates of the Leningrad Institute of Theatre, Music and Cinema. For quite some time Nikolay Borovkov has acted as the company’s managing director. He was also the producer of the play Green Blood basedon J.B.Priestly’s fairy tale The Snoggle. Since 1987 the company has been led by Igor Ignatiev. He has staged a play called From the Haven of Liverpool based on Rudyard Kipling. An article in Animation magazine has been devoted to this production. His other production was The Wild One, based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Lame Duck.

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Finally in 1974, the theatre was given a permanent home. The place required much work to rebuild it, and it took nearly twelve years to become a puppet theatre in the full sense of the word. On 22 November 1986 the company opened its theatre, which seats three hundred. With a staff of over one hundred, the once tiny company has become a big theatre, equipped with state-of-the-art equipment. Its new life began on that day. In December this year the company celebrated its forty-fifth anniversary. Apart from the Soviet Union, it has shown its plays to children in Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Poland, Iran, Egypt, Kuwait, Somalia, Sudan and Turkey—over sixteen thousand performances for some six million people. In conclusion, I would like to remind you that the very essence of the work done by the company, and their main goal, is to re-create fairy tales for children, shaping their personalities, giving them complexity, emphasizing their uniqueness. That is the idea the Leningrad Puppet Theatre of the Fairy Tales has been serving throughout its lifetime. Let us hope that the theatre continues along this road striving towards perfection. Contemporary Theatre Review, 1992, Vol. © 1992 Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH Printed 1, 1 pp. 55–61 in the United Kingdom Photocopying permitted by licence only

One Individual’s View of the Value of the Study of Russian Art and Puppet Theatre John Blundall Cannon Hill Puppet Theatre, The Midlands Arts Centre, UK

Like most people I had seen the Punch and Judy during my childhood and, apart from one or two shows, they didn’t mean a great deal to me. I had also seen several marionette shows performed in small picture-frame stage. These performances were generally circus and variety shows that, once again, meant little. Involvement in circus and variety performances as an artiste meant that there seemed little point in making puppets do what human performers could do better. Involvement with artistes from the socialist countries, both in the circus and in variety theatre, frequently introduced me to original and imaginative puppet acts performed by highly skilled people. Curiosity led to experiments with puppets in clown routines and, though these experiments were successful and interesting, they offered me little real challenge. In the early 1950s, by accident, in a black church hall in Birmingham, I discovered a small, dark-green screen standing on an open platform. An audience was assembling, mostly adults. A lady and gentleman mounted the platform; he disappeared behind the screen, while she sat at a piano close by and began to play. Above the screen small hand puppets performed a series of short musical and dramatic items. The performers were Sergei and Olga Obraztsov. The music, the fine expressive movements of the tiny puppets and, above all, the personality of Obraztsov was a revelation. The skills demonstrated by the two performers I could only compare with those these with which I was familiar in the circus and variety theatres. Later on I showed Obraztsov a marionette; his reaction was a surprise. He explained that the soul of the puppet is the palm of the hand and that the further that the puppet was from the hand, the less life, soul and character the puppet has. These and other remarks had a profound effect on me and provoked a need to discover more about Obraztsov and his work. There was little published material available apart from brief items in Soviet Weekly, and his book My Profession. This book also introduced the names of other Russian artists. Some years later Obraztsov returned with his theatre to perform Aladdin, and The Unusual Concert. Both of these productions were a revelation—a scale almost unimaginable, well designed, and vast numbers of puppets operated with consumate skill, and dramatic and comic qualities. A natural curiosity and the realization that the Russian puppet theatre showed that the puppet theatre was capable of expressing a vast range of ideas, provoked a need to try to discover why there were such differences between the British and Russian puppet theatre.

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It was clear that the puppet theatre in Russia had imaginative, artistic leaders, scenographers, well-trained actors and technicians of all kinds, strong professional organization and sufficient financial support. It also seemed clear that there was highlevel recognition of the importance of the puppet theatre and the arts in general. The need to find out more about Russian puppet theatre and other forms of theatre and art led to a voyage of discovery which revealed much of importance to the puppeteer. The names of Stanislavsky, Eisenstein, Meyerhold, Vakhtangov, Diaghilev and the artists of the Mir Iskustva [The World of Art], and choreographers and composers emerged. Many of these artists were influenced by puppets and the popular arts, some of them also led me to the study of Asian and oriental forms of expression. The puppet theatre seemed to me to be a useful microcosm, a synthetic theatre which combines all of the expressive arts and crafts, also a performance art with considerable expressive potential which could go beyond the limitations of the living actor. A theatre of symbol and metaphor, a theatre of moving sculpture governed by the aesthetics which govern the visual arts and crafts. Much of what I had experienced in British puppet theatre was derivative, a copy of the performance of the puppets human counterpart, and frequently the techniques of construction and manipulation were kept secret. Most of it lacking the cultural breadth and richness of the Russian puppet theatre. The secrecy element seemed most destructive to any serious development to the art. The comparison of the Russian puppet play with what was happening in Great Britain showed how little puppeteers here made use of the many experiments of artists from other disciplines. Both experience and the study of what was being done in the Soviet Union indicated the puppets could function outside the traditional confines, and that more complex ideas could be exploited. British puppet companies traditionally consisted mostly of one or two persons, which clearly limited the possibility of developing more complex productions. If more complex and experimental work was to be done, the formation of larger companies with permanent theatres was essential. In the late 1950s this was impossible, but with continued work and effort it could become possible. The pursuit to discover the best development and practice in puppet theatre once again led to the history and development of twentieth century theatre and art in the Soviet Union. Obraztsov with his background as an academic painter and actor in the Nemirovitch Danchenko Theatre, plus his theory on the puppet theatre was fascinating to me, as were the many facets of Eisenstein’s work and research. Eisenstein and Igor Moiseyev the dancer and choreographer frequently spoke of elements of the art and philosophy of the Chinese, particularly in relationship to the concept of the nature and training of artists of all disciplines. The puppet theatre is a complex form of expression where every element of the production is supportive and where all forms of expression need to be analysed and utilized according to the demands of the puppet and the puppet theatre. It is also essential to continually search for a new dynamic in the puppet theatre, to break conventions—to go away to come back. The study of a wide range of expressive artists experiments in the use of puppets is both interesting and important. Most of the new movements in twentieth-century art contained some puppet elements, many Soviet artists during the early part of the century

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developed important and influential work and ideas of great value to puppeteers. The study and understanding of these gave me greater confidence to make further experiments and remove the traditional confines of puppet theatre. Diaghilev and his Ballet Russe was a microcosm of the artistic life of Russia. He established forms of artistic cooperation which made a major contribution to international culture. Many of the artists involved made important experiments to solve problems and develop new initiatives. Many Russian artists took ideas from the easel to the stage, and from the stage to the easel. The early-twentieth-century efforts to develop a new dynamic in the Russian theatre included efforts to dehumanize the actor, and to develop a greater awareness of the creative exploitation of the stage space. Masters life Stanislavsky studies aspects of the psychological motivation of characters, and many other experiments to improve the skills of actors. All of these experiments seemed to me to be of great importance to puppeteers. Most of the personalities involved in the development of the new dynamic in the Russian theatre established groups of collaborators who recognized the diversity and creative potential of the stage. The reorganized the components of the theatre and encouraged the designer to assume to more dynamic function in the development of the stage production. They also encouraged stage action to evolve not only horizontally, but also in depth, breadth and height. It is also interesting to note that they concentrated not only on the classical repertory, but also on applying their skills and ideas to film, cabaret, dance, the variety theatre and the puppet theatre. Bakst developed theatrical principles in terms of transcending of the confines of the pictorial surface and the organization of forms in their interaction with space. He concentrated on the rhythmically organized space, and on the nature of the actor and scenic elements assuming equal roles. His colour theory and practice was a revelation and a major influence on many forms of design beyond the theatre. His costume designs for the theatre demonstrated a remarkable understanding of various cultures, and his ability to indicate a style of movement for the actor and dancer. Alexander Benois, a cultured man was seen as one of the major figures in the Mir Iskustva [The World of Art]. His books on the Russian Ballet offer a unique insight into the development of art and culture in Russia during the early part of the twentieth century. There were vast numbers of artists who evolved important theory and practice. George Yakulov, the constructivist, was involved in design during the later and more controversial years of Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet. He represented a choreography of humans and machines. He conceived that actors and their locale were not just decoration but moving volumes. Much of his work was less suited to the conventional stage space then it was to “happenings” and the “circus”, being based on the principle of perpetual motion and the kaleidoscopic effect of froms and colours. Alexandra Exter was an influential artist who, as an innovator, shared and practised the ideas of her collaborators. Pavel Tchelitchev learned much from her, particularly in developing an interest in making immobile forms mobile, developing exotic colour contrasts and a sense of movement in his creations. In 1916 Nina Efimova made her debut. She was a painter who realized the potential of the puppet theatre. She said that the charm of the puppets lay in their movements, and

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that the meaning of their existence lay in the play. She also recognized the puppet theatre as a theatre of action and the art of play. The puppet and the puppet theatre became the major preoccupation of many artists and, in 1918, a number of them came together in Petrograd to establish The Theatre of Marionettes, Petrushka’ and Shadows and Julie Sazonova. Constantin Somov who loved the theatre though rarely designed for it, created theatricalized paintings, particularly his Harlequinades reminiscent of the miniature theatre, where the figures appeared to be involved in some ballet mechanique in which every movement and gesture was controlled and predetermined. He also concentrated the actions of his characters within the tight confines of the stage. Nikolai Kalmakov designed a production called The Power of Magic and Death. Alexandra Exter and Liubov Popova joined in the venture. Popova had collaborated with Meyerhold and was interested in space as a creative agent—the sequential spatial relationships. In 1919, for the new venture she designed a production called The Country Priest and His Dunderhead Servant by Alexander Pushkin. She also planned to create a “puppet laboratory” in Moscow in 1921. Lissitzky created marionette interpretations based on his concept of the puppet as a vehicle for communicating ideas. He applied the experimental artistic systems of Popova, Exter and others to the marionette as a method of enriching Russian puppet theatre. There is little that is new and original in art and, in terms of puppet theatre, much of what is considered to be new was perfected by past generations of puppeteers worldwide. Perhaps the most significant development in contemporary puppet theatre is the appearance of the actor on the puppet stage on equal terms with the puppet, a technique perfected in the past. Most of the experiments in modern creative puppet theatre took place in the socialist countries where resources in terms of buildings, large-scale companies and substantial financial support was established as a direct result of Obraztsov’s work and ideas. Each of the countries developed strong national characteristics in their puppet theatres, utilizing a vast range of techniques as a means of exploiting more complex and socially relevant material and ideas. The development of a new dynamic in the puppet theatre and the removal of the traditional confines, particularly the playboards/paravans, demanded that the actor in the puppet theatre develop a wide range of effective performing skills beyond those required by the conventional actor. It also meant that an analysis of the function of the actor on the puppet stage was made and clearly understood, and that the study of the best training for actors in the puppet theatre became essential. New and interesting artistic leaders emerged with imaginative and original production techniques. In recent months the Russian director Yuri Llubimov was seen rehearsing his production of Hamlet. In the play he exploited important elements of the physicalization of dialogue, and the potential of a vast, heavily textured curtain which moved continuously, virtually performing as another acting member of the company. Once again, an experience from which directors actors in the puppet theatre could learn a great deal. The advanced study of the training of actors for the puppet theatre requires special consideration. It is, of course, important to deal with all the skills and disciplines of the conventional actor, but the danger is that in conventional terms the actor’s or dancer’s body is the instrument for the projection of dramatic ideas, while in the puppet theatre it is the puppet. However, with the use of highly trained actors in the puppet theatre, the

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problems of effective projection of dramatic ideas through the puppet, and the lack of understanding by designers and directors of the value and function of the puppet, frustration has frequently led to its disappearance. The director and actor in the puppet theatre require a range of special skills and effective training which can only be carried out over a long period of time, ideally in a well-organized professional puppet theatre. These individuals require special qualities. In the case of the actor, it is my opinion that the introvert is move suited for training in the puppet theatre, and the extrovert for the dramatic theatre. Also, it seems to me to be important to train an actor for the puppet theatre who is also capable of expressing ideas through drawing and painting, as well as performance art and music, etc. The results of the study of Russian art and theatre clearly indicated to me the need to train a specialized staff capable of meeting the demands of complex production techniques, and organizing a professional theatre, both elements in a permanent space created for the purpose of developing imaginative puppet theatre productions using the experiments of past generations in the theatre, puppet theatre and the allied arts. Two other elements concerned the education of audiences able to accept new experiments in puppet theatre and the many individuals involved in the administration of the arts. One of the most important people to impress on me the importance of understanding and respecting the life and creative potential of children and young people, and the nature of the child’s development as an intelligent and well-informed future adult was Lenora Shpet, a remarkable woman who played a significant part in the development of both children’s and puppet theatres in the Soviet Union. On an early visit to the Soviet Union Lenora Shpet took me to visit the Institute for the Aesthetic Development of Children in Moscow, and to the State Circus School. According to my own early artistic development, which revolved around a natural curiosity for all things, the need to develop a wide range of skills and disciplines in the field of the expressive arts, and the challenge of seemingly impossible pursuits, the visits to these two institutions were great importance to me. The Institute of Aesthetic Development of Children seemed to fulfil a very important role from the point of view of providing a wide range of artistic experiences for children outside of the formal education system. For children with talent for the expressive arts the institute provided a unique opportunity to develop their work and ideas under highly skilled and experienced teachers. This early artistic development is essential for those who later undertake professional training. The State Circus School was yet another revelation. Having grown up with circus artistes who, in general terms, trained themselves, such highly organized professional training for this disciplined art was something Western artistes could only dream of. Their training not only consisted of circus skills, but also a wide range of other artistic skills and disciplines. The two institutions showed clearly the difference in the attitude towards the arts and first-and second-stage training for them. During the visit a considerable amount of time was spent in the State Puppet Theatre of Obraztsov, which gave me an opportunity to see many performances for both adults and children. It also provided a unique opportunity to watch rehearsals taken by Obraztsov and others. This experience showed just how skilful the company was in all areas, and the importance of an understanding of all aspects of the theatre and the allied arts. There were also visits to other puppet theatres, each one with their own style.

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Of all of the experiences during the visits the lasting impressions were left by interviews with Obraztsov on many aspects of his work and ideas inside and outside the theatre. Particularly, watching him in rehearsals, demonstrating to actors the analysis and construction of characters and his unique ability to transform his own body to assume the physical and vocal characteristics of the characters he was dealing with. These were the experiences that made me realize just how much there was to learn, and the responsibility of the artistic leader of a puppet theatre to acquire the skills and cultural base necessary to equip an individual for the task. The period following my first visit to the Soviet Union was spent working in film and television and, with available time, attempting to study the many aspects of Russian art. There have been two experiences that have influenced me greatly. The first was attending performances and lecture demonstrations given by Igor Moiseyev and his remarkable dance company. His skill as a dancer and choreographer are formidable, but it was his analysis of folk dance and its origins and development, its artistic arrangement for the stage, and his philosophy of art and expression which were of major interest to me. This philosophy, in relationship to the theory of the nature and training of the artist using the metaphor of the gardener and the flower, proved to be similar to that of the Chinese and Japanese. The second experience was an exhibition of the work of Sergei Eisenstein, and the analysis of his life and work by his biographer Maria Seton. This was my first real contact with his work and was of great significance. In 1988 a vast exhibition of Eisenstein’s work was organized in the UK. The range and content of the exhibition was bewildering but it demonstrated the creative process of an outstanding personality and, once again, the importance of continuous research and experiment. In the mid-1960s the Midlands Arts Centre was opened in Birmingham. It was the first purpose-built arts centre in Great Britain created for the purpose of providing children and young people with the opportunity to involve themselves in a wide range of creative pursuits with professional guidance, also to provide a theatre with a multi-skilled company to develop a theatrical literacy programme. The Midlands Arts Centre was very much like the Institute of Aesthetic Development in Moscow, providing a similar programme of activities. Part of the programme was dedicated to the development of puppet theatre work both with children and young people, and a base for the training of specialists for puppet theatre. This was the first time that formal professional training was available in the UK, albeit on a small scale. In December 1969 the first puppet theatre company was formed and the first production opened. Much of what I learned from the development of Russian art and the theatre has continued to be of major importance to the development of our theatre. Basically I realize that there is only one form of theatre, that is “good theatre”, irrespective of whether it is for children or adults. It is irresponsible to confront children with second-rate experiences, particularly in the puppet theatre. It is important to give them experiences that will stretch them and increase their general awareness of the complexity of creative puppet theatre. Experience over many years has proved that the preconceived ideas of puppet theatre on the part of adults frequently prevents them from being able to accept many new production techniques. The child is able to accept complex and sophisticated

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ideas as a result of their ability to become involved in each new experience with an open mind and a unique level of concentration. Consistency and methodical development over a long period of time is essential. Many aspects of modern life have worked against the arts in the West. Immediate results are expected. Puppeteers often move from one course or workshop to another, frequently without exploiting what they have learned, or realizing the relationship between the elements that they have learned. Much of the modern work which is produced in puppet theatre is often self-indulgent, mediocre and superficial, frequently lacking strong roots and the ability to communicate ideas clearly to an audience. Currently there is a major initiative to train vast numbers of puppeteers. This could prove futile due to the lack of talented artistic leaders and directors capable of utilizing the skills of these individuals. On the basis of good training, guidance, and many years of experience, there may be a small number of individuals who will emerge as outstanding artistic leaders. We should give this area more attention as without this the puppeteeractor, and the puppet theatre will not achieve its true potential. Artistic leaders like great clowns are born not made. These individuals need many years of experience of a large variety of skills and situations, and more effort must be made to create situations in which this experience can be developed, ideally under the guidance of someone with an established track record in the field. Again, it is clear from the number of outstanding productions from Soviet puppet theatres, that there exists a considerable number of highly talented artistic leaders who demonstrate examples of good practice-based on a sound knowledge and experience of past experiments. During recent months I met with a visitor from Leningrad who, on the back of the effects of perestroika, was here to look at various practices in the arts, particularly in arts centres. He outlined the new directive in his country to make the arts more self-sufficient. This is a situation well known to British puppeteers, a situation with many problems facing all artists regardless of their specialist field. Hopefully this new development in the Soviet Union will not lead to the loss of puppet theatres, and the loss of important links with past generations of artists who established the unique quality of Russian culture, and who made a major contribution to the culture of other countries too. My life and work is inextricably linked with Russian art and culture. Hopefully other puppeteers will be encouraged to try to understand the experiments in Russian art. I will always be grateful for the early and continued support and encouragement of so many talented people involved in it. Contemporary Theatre Review, 1992, Vol. 1, 1 pp. 63–66 Photocopying permitted by licence only

© 1992 Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH Printed in the United Kingdom

About My Work as a Puppet Theatre Scenographer Nelly Polyakova Skazka Theatre, Leningrad

I was invited to work at the state puppet theatre Skazka by its former chief artistic director Yuri Yeliseev whose name, along with that of Sergei Obraztsov, has become connected with the first days of the Russian puppet theatre. The company did not have its own permanent stage and existed as an touring company. But already at those times the state companies had sufficiently large staff and sound financial possibilities. My task was to look for new scenic forms for the touring company with minimal loss of artistic quality. And it seems that I succeeded due to the good training I had received at the institute, strong production-running traditions of the company, and my previous theatrical experience in dramatic theatre. We did not have proper stage lighting so I paid much attention to the colour scheme of shows and to the independence of the stage “box”. That allowed me to maneouvre in almost any situation (from professional technically well-equipped stages to school auditoriums). Thus, for example, we played our show Small Tiger Petrik on the wooden platform when we were on tour in Sudan. We also confronted a technical problem—easy transportation and minimal loss of time while assembling and dismantling our set. These conditions continued since the sets I suggested were too complicated for the company and its former technical experience. Now that the company has its own very good house and comfortable stage, much of the touring company atmosphere disappears. But I think that in spite of this permanent site the theatre needs to move and to tour; this is especially true for puppet theatre if we recall its roots. I came to the puppet theatre during the so-called “period of destroying the screens”. As a designer with dramatic theatre training I was doubly pleased. I felt like liberating puppeteers to demonstrate their stage potential to the fullest. Together with the puppeteer the puppet itself started to win over the stage space, from proscenium to the backdrop. The scenic space became integral either figuratively or preconstructivly. In the opera for puppets Oh, that Balda (music by Boris Kravchenko, direction by Yuri Yeliseev) the set consisted of screens of various dimensions made of best mat. The tale by Alexander Pushkin that was chosen for this opera is based on folk literature, and one can detect in the show the traces of the traditional Russian style called “lubok”. New space and new possibilities brought to life new forms of puppet manipulation. Children’s drawings have came to life in the show Magic Events at the Museum (play by Violetta Palchinskayte, directior by Nikolay Borovkov). Flat puppets come down from the walls and are manipulated all over the stage by actors who are dressed in traditional artists’ clothes—blouses and berets.

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And now about the puppet. It has “pursued” me all my life. I played puppets in different ways up to the last year of school. My late grandmother Anna Pavlovna used to say: “You’ll still be playing puppets during your wedding ceremony.” Once I brought a paper doll to the institute lecture and with it hundreds of costumes of various historical epochs. I will always remember my teachers. I graduated from the Leningrad Theatre Institute (staging department), where my class professor was Nikolay Akimov. (His name is now in Encyclopedia Britannica). He was a pupil of Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, artistic director and chief scenographer of the Comedy Theatre, a famous Petrograd graphic artist, and genuine theatre enthusiast. He wrote many books on theatre and, being a very witty person, he created a series of wonderful portraits of artists. He was also a founder of our department at the theatre institute. The second, equally important, part of my training was at the Leningrad Theatre for Young Spectators, where its chief scenographer Natalia Ivanova, director Pavel Vaysbrem and later Zinovy Korogodsky introduced me to the field of theatre for children and I was happy serving this cause. Immediately after graduating from the institute I worked at theatres in Omsk and Gorky. For twenty years now I have been working as a scenographer at the Leningrad puppet theatre Skazka. I was lucky with my teachers and I was fortunate to enter the theatre of such a wonderful genre—the Skazka (Skazka is Russian for fairy tale). Now back to the puppet. I started to feel at ease with the puppet only about seven or eight years ago. For me the puppet is a toiler, a worker, an artist. Its work load is enormous. The puppet carries artistic, emotional and image-bearing code. I have followed the puppet all my life, but it always escapes me. It seems to me that one can reach it only when one achieves the heights of Pygmalion. I shall repeat once more: for me the puppet is first of all an artist, everything obeys it. The puppet theatre actor’s selflessness is obvious. He gives his soul and body movements to the puppet, fulfils the instructions that the director and scenographer have created for the puppet. The communication between puppet and puppeteer is defined not only by director but also by scenographers. The presence of the actor on the stage should be justified not only from artistic and logical points of view. It is very important that the make-up, costume, and overall appearance of the actor should be determined, as well as the proportional correlation of the actor and the puppet. The whole structure of the show and its development depends on how this problem is solved. In the show White Envelope among Yellow Leaves (play by Bulgarian playwright Valery Petrov, direction by Nikolai Borovkov). The action takes place during the dream of the main character, a boy called Svetlin. The actors are strange white clowns in the dream. The puppet is bright and distinctly shaped. Its size and mechanics are free. They correspond to the logic of action and are justified by the antilogic of the dream. The set represents a strange white pavillion with unexpected exits through the walls, ceiling and floor. The show Magician of the Emerald City, based on The Wizard of Oz by F. Baum, was staged by the director Valery Sarukhanov. The magician Goodvin multiplies into many Goodvins. All the actors playing are Goodvins are dressed in black, modern tail-coat shirts and black country-style hats. The is bright, and its movements are open. Our show The Green Blood is an example of the spatial treatment of a show. The actor’s task is a diverse and multi-functional one. The world of the strong—the actor is in

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a mask, the world of the spirit is in the puppet. Thus, a successful blend of all the elements gives the desired result; the puppet comes alive and reaches to spectators. Nobody can resist it—it can tackle any idea. I have worked with more than twenty-seven directors of drama and puppet theatres, many of them more than once. I have made sets for about one hundred shows at professional theatres. My creative bonds with director Zinovy Korogodsky are ten years old now. It began at the Leningrad theatre for young spectators where I worked on the performances of Chukovsky Tales and Shadows by Saltykov-Shedrin. The were very important for me. And now we try to to work with him on performances for adults at the puppet theatre. Creative contacts with this great master of the Soviet theatre did not pass unnoticed by me. Each contact with Zinovy Korogodsky is a great joy although it is not so simple to work with him. I am also glad that I have had the chance to work with such major directors of the puppet theatre as Victor Sudarushkin and Yuri Eliseev. In my experience I never have waited for a “push” from the director but I myself try to find the ideas in the play that are meaningful to me. There have been many occasions when I did not like the play and had to turn it down, even at theatres where I would like to work myself. The play is the moral basis, the foundation. I never start until I prepare this foundation. Much time is spent in discussions with the director, the contacts being established, the idea being crystallized. Different forms of material and spiritual culture are involved in the process of work. This also includes the work at libraries and art museums. After that I started to study the atmosphere of the show, the type of scenic space required. If the aim has been defined very clearly it is quite easy to find the atmosphere, space and the puppet. In the production The Lukull’s bride I worked with the director Victor Sudarushkin. Perhaps you have been this performance in England during our tour with this show? The characters of the show cannot get rid of the magic circle of intrigues. The action takes place in Ancient Rome. The sets are a stylized stage variant of the Coliseum. It is easy to play with each turn of the “circle”. The actors feel free in this space, sometimes in masks, sometimes behind the screen. The puppets are rod puppets; they are mobile and move together with actor. The period in which the puppet theatre gained headway in playwrighting and world prestige in accordance with other types of art is nearing its end. I am not worried by the problem of returning to the puppet. Without the puppet in any scenic form the puppet theatre, a whole theatrical art genre, disappears. Nor am I not bothered by the problem: with or without a screen. The problem that exists is the problem of an artist’s eminence in this or that artistic form chosen in order to fulfil the scenic idea in the puppet theatre genre. We can bring much to our type of theatrical art and many extremes are possible here as experiments or in seeking new ways. But if you have gone beyond the borders of the genre you should recognize that you are beyond the border and of course, in this case, coming back is necessary. The main thing is that the artist should not stop liking the puppet and should not like himself more than the puppet.

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To be honest there was a period when I wanted to quit the puppet theatre. It seemed to me that dramatic theatre could offer me more possibilities and that the puppet theatre was not my “line”. But I managed to overcome it when I turned to good, serious plays and when I tried myself on stages of various puppet theatres. And nowadays many colleagues in dramatic theatre envy the artists of the puppet theatres. We are becoming fashionable, together with directors. And still there are not enough highly artistic plays for puppet theatre. My dream is to work on the tales Snegurochka (by Ostrovsky) for children and adults, and Winter’s Tale by Shakespeare. I would also like to work on a ballet for the puppet theatre. Of ften, when speaking of the roles of an artist and director, people usually speak of the responsibility of the artist, etc…. But I am driven by egoism; I work for myself, for pleasure, for my own personal happiness (or at least I strive for that consciously and subconsciously). And of course there are always difficulties and many of them. Contemporary Theatre Review, 1992, Vol. 1, 1 pp. 67–74 Photocopying permitted by licence only

© 1992 Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH Printed in the United Kingdom

British Puppet Theatre: Its Present State and Future Perspectives Penny Francis Puppet Centre Trust

Puppet theatre in Britain has never been as widespread, nor as well-regarded as it is today. It is moving steadily towards acceptance as a full member of the fraternity of the performing arts. There are some 250 small touring professional groups playing all over Scotland, Ireland, England and Wales, four larger groups in permanent theatres, several groups that are larger still in numbers but which have no permanent playing space, and, in addition, there are at least two hundred Punch and Judy showmen. Only a handful of the groups receives state support of any substance, and none approaches the kind of subsidy provided for the puppet theatres of the Soviet Union. This state of affairs has evolved in parallel with that of the rest of western Europe, with certain British differences of emphasis—chiefly that of finance, meaning that puppetry and puppeteers receive less income, earned or donated, than our mainland cousins. Our present situation is on the whole very different from that of puppet theatre in the Soviet Union, as must already be clear. Broadly speaking, the British tradition of puppetry rests on the glove puppet as the ancient means of expression for popular entertainers—storytellers, fairground and travelling players, Punch and Judy (but only since the end of the eighteenth century)— and the marionette, the string puppet, imported by Italians in the seventeenth century and adopted as an entertainment for the educated classes ever since, although since the Second World War the marionette is more rarely seen. Rod puppets seem hardly to have been heard of until the fifties, but different kinds of shadows could be found, from the French Ombres Chinoises which arrived fairly briefly at the end of the eighteenth century, and the very British Galanty Show, much less refined and often played from within a booth as an addition to Punch and Judy. Another kind of animated—or agitated—figure must be included: the cardboard cutout character of the Toy Theatre, a special kind of drawing room entertainment still available today and still enjoyed by many young people, often as their introduction to a lifetime’s devotion to the theatre in general. In the earliest years of the twentieth century, fashion and the First World War marked the end of the era of the great travelling family marionette theatres, and it was not until the twenties that the first stirrings of a new life for British puppetry were felt, though perhaps this life was no more than a reflection of the vitality of the work that could be found at that period in France, Germany and Italy and that from time to time flashed in and out of this country. But the British marionette of the twenties, thirties and forties has its own very recognizable appearance.

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The London Marionette Theatre, the foundation of the British Puppet and Model Theatre Guild, the activities of artists such as Simmonds, Wilkinson, Lanchester, Blackham, Whanslaw and Hogarth, started to affirm the power of puppetry as a performing art. They began to explore ever wider territory, in terms of repertoire and techniques. In addition, the art began to be enriched by the attention of some of our artists in other media, perhaps encouraged by mainland giants such as Picasso and Klee who had found some sources of inspiration in the puppet. Their involvement caused a gradual rise in the status of the puppet theatre, and a return of fashionable audiences. Before the Second World War our small princesses in their large palaces were regularly entertained the puppets. During the interwar years the repertoire for the performances was most often the “variety show”, a series of short items, musical or spoken, including circus turns. The shows featured realistically designed animals or humans made of wood or paper mâché that were made and operated to imitate real animals and humans. There was still an element of magic in puppetry, with unseen operators and audiences pretending that they were dealing with a miniature but real world somehow come to life. Music was provided by gramophone records and live speech and playtexts were used less and less. Occasionally however a full-length story would be told, and a good author adapted. George Bernard Shaw wrote a play for the Lanchester Marionettes in the thirties. It is important to remember that the targeted audience was adult or of mixed age range, very rarely children only. The same had been true of puppet theatre in Russia and other countries of Eastern Europe, but the situation there was changing rapidly with the introduction of the new state puppet theatres and the disappearance of all street and fairground puppetry. Shadow puppets gradually earned their place in the repertoire of the theatre performances through the artistry of Lotte Reiniger, an emigrant German, and the teaching and writing of the very English Helen Binyon. The Second World War once more caused a suspension of this fairly rich puppetry revival, though it is interesting to note that by 1939 the puppeteers (with the exception of Olive Blackham) were almost unaffected by Edward Gordon Craig’s theories of theatre design and performance, by then an integral part of the development of the actors’ theatre. Then, after the war, came the revolution—for puppetry at least. The profound changes in the character of British puppet theatre since the fifties came about through various growing influences that still exert their pressures: the foundation of the Arts Council of Great Britain, our nearest equivalent to a Ministry of Culture, but at “arm’s length” from government and, incidentally, with no power to approve or veto texts (only the power to withhold funding for anything that they did and do not approve of which some might say amounts to the same thing); the advent of television; the discovery of many new materials suitable for sculpture, graphic art and therefore puppet-making; the new social phenomenon of a special theatre for children; the steady rise of UNIMA and the opening of international channels of communication; the puppet theatres of the communist countries, with their unbelievably large facilities and staffing, all heavily state-subsidized. For the British they were exemplified by Sergei Obraztsov’s Central State Puppet Theatre of Moscow, which packed out one of London’s largest theatres during its very successful visit in the fifties. The last and perhaps the most resonant influence on postwar puppetry

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was the decline of interest in naturalism -I mean the imitation of real life in forms and themes. Some of these influences overlap. In Britain there was an undefined national policy that in general a special repertory for children should be developed and funding made available for this. This view was reinforced if not instigated by British television on which there were special programme slots for children’s viewing. For the youngest these were always filled by puppets or animation and I am convinced that the general public’s fixed belief that puppets are only for the entertainment of small children stems almost wholly from the programming policy of the BBC in those early years of television. The confined adventures of Muffin the Mule, Sooty, the Flowerpot Men, the Woodentops and Andy Pandy were watched by millions. Excellent as some of these were within the limits laid down, none of this was conducive to an exciting artistic future for the puppet theatre. Worse, Punch and Judy climbed on the bandwagon of the demand for children’s entertainment, and most of the professors found themselves diluting and diminishing the old tradition until Punch was a travesty of his former anarchic self. However, in this artistic near-desert of the fifties and early sixties there were some sturdy new plants which have seeded the whole country within their own lifetime. The new wave of vocational puppeteers, inspired and dedicated people, were naturally taught and encouraged by the established, pre-war groups, notably the still very active Hogarth Puppets, but they had new and original paths they wished to tread. At this point we might profitably look at the manner in which these new puppeteers learned and still do learn their craft. Anyone in Britain may decide to become a puppeteer. There is no need to take a diploma, to learn the history or the necessary skills. Anyone may print a leaflet, mail it out, and, with luck, sell a puppet show. Most professionals are solo practitioners or a husband-and-wife team perhaps with a background training in one area of art, craft or theatre. After the war three organizations existed to cater for puppetry: the British Puppet and Model Theatre Guild, primarily a showcase for talent of all kinds but increasingly conservative in taste, also providing a useful social programme; the Educational Puppetry Association, founded by A.R.(Panto) Philpott, a glove puppeteer, thinker and writer, who believed passionately in the value of puppetry as a medium for good, and especially as a valuable tool in improving the quality of life for schoolchildren and the disabled; and of course the British section of UNIMA. All three ran lectures and workshops and provided a forum, but none thought about any regular training courses for puppeteers. Indeed until recently the very ideas of any “schooling” or recognition of talent by means of diplomas, certificates or any kind of regulated entry to the puppetry scene was—and in many cases still is—anathema. The characteristics of most British puppeteers include sturdy independence and a strong dislike of institutions or establishments. Each is his own man, with his own vision, not to be contaminated by outside influence, not even those of a director or writer. One of our famous practitioners referred to it as “the ringmaster syndrome”. More charitably, many of the puppeteers are either poets or visual artists at heart and are therefore happiest working alone. In no area of our puppet theatre life is the contrast with practice in the Soviet Union more marked. There one finds long-established schools with four-year courses entirely devoted to the training of puppet operators (called actor-puppeteers) and directors.

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In this country, then and now, anybody wishing to become a professional must be selftaught, or if he or she is very lucky indeed, become apprenticed to one of our established puppeteers. This state of affairs is now changing in the West. A distinguishing feature of the best of the modern puppetmasters is their commitment not only to training the puppeteers of the future but also to recognizing the need to extend and supplement their own skills. Full-time training courses in puppet theatre have been established in Germany, France, Spain and Holland, and more are on the way. Doubtless Britain will follow. Already there are several intensive short courses at professional level in making and performing, study bursaries are available and other initiatives are soon expected. To return to the fifties and sixties, the best of the new wave of puppeteers perceived their puppet performances as a theatrical means of expression that was no longer an imitation of human theatre. Their philosophy was—and is—that puppet theatre is a separate branch of the performing arts with its own potential, needing a different set of skills and a different repertoire. It was, they declared, a theatre of metaphor and symbol, of archetypes, of caricature, of imagination and fantasy. Plays for puppets should not be text-oriented but should exploit the possibilities of fine scenography. Puppets that merely attempted to imitate actors were redundant. The most influential of the young and not-so-young players gave the old guard a series of shocks and, at the same time, hope for the regeneration of their art. One of the most adventurous and innovative was Barry Smith, actor and artist. He saw the puppet as a thing of many and varied forms. His production Playspace was one of the first in this country to present the actor as a stage character alongside the puppet. Barry Smith, who died in 1989, was the only puppet master of his time who continued to state that all his work was for adult audiences. His repertoire included a fine Punch and Judy show, Victorian pantomime and medieval legend; some plays by Beckett, poetically and delicately interpreted, and other programmes of short and entirely original items, interpreting the world in a manner either funny, satirical or tragic. John Wright’s Little Angel Theatre has been the most consistently sought-after and artistically interesting company in Britain, often touring overseas, with its own permanent theatre in London. It is a private company, with its aesthetic rooted in African art, as both the directors are originally from South Africa. Both are designers and craftsmen of exceptionally high calibre. Their performances are usually with marionettes, with an emphasis on beauty of form, colour, light and sound. The plays are usually adaptions of fairy and folk tales, more text-based than those of the other new-wave puppeteers. The Little Angel runs on little more than private patronage and box-office receipts. In very recent years it has received modest regular support from the municipality. Another influential talent working since the sixties is Violet Philpott whose original plays for glove puppets are entirely for children. She was a pupil of the late Panto Philpott, and though her shows are by no means didactic in tone, she, like Panto, aims to convey the joy of the unselfish life to the very young, who are usually infected by the charm and humour of the performances. The Philpotts led the movement away from the use of that seductive invention, the tape-recorder, in an era when even a few Punch performers had fallen for the infernal machine! Ted Milton streaked across the puppet theatre scene like a crazy meteor, grabbing the Punch and Judy tradition by the throat and transforming it into a violent but very funny

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theatre of protest. His heavy solid wood puppets were surrealist in form, and more obviously anarchic than Punch ever was, I suspect. There is something—a trace—of his influence to be found in a recently formed and very talented group which calls itself Faulty Optic and which is currently much in demand in Europe. But in Faulty Optic the anarchism is not violent. John Blundall has been one of our leading puppet scenographers and operators since the late sixties. After working on a television series John collaborated with the Caricature Theatre of Wales, the most ambitious puppet theatre company ever to appear in Britain, with good support from the Welsh Arts Council. It was the nearest in size and ambitions to an eastern European company, with designers, writers, craftsmen and directors brought in for many differing styles of performance. Experimentation was possible in such a theatre, which was based in Cardiff, and the director, Jane Phillips, was a dynamic and pioneering force in British puppetry during the seventies and early eighties. She and John Blundall formed a short partnership within Caricature which was interrupted by an invitation to John to found and direct the Cannon Hill Puppet Theatre in Birmingham, his home town, in 1968. He has been there ever since. The Cannon Hill company, wellsubsidized and the most secure in Britain in financial terms, presents shows for children of various ages all the year round. There are usually about eight to ten employees, puppet-makers, actor-puppeteers, an administrator and, nowadays a Director of Productions who leaves John to design, craft and oversee the work of the company. The repertoire includes fairy tales and legends from many countries, including eastern European classics like Little Tiger Peter and Tales of the Land of the Firebird, and, indeed, the eastern European influence is very strong in the design and most other aspects of the company’s work. The technique is usually, but by no means always, that of the rod puppet seen with its operator on-stage; the operator may be only a neutral manipulator or he may be a character of the action. Returning to Wales, Jane Phillips’ Caricature Theatre company continued to extend the boundaries of British puppetry, working for children and sometimes for adults, appearing with much success on television, increasing its income and susidy every year, until suddenly in 1984, with little warning or reason, the Welsh Arts Council withdrew all funding and the company’s activities came to an end. It was a Punch-like body blow for all of British puppetry. The Caricature repertoire was very widely chosen, from Greek legends to Grimms’ fairy tales, from traditional Christmas pantomimes to Roald Dahl. The company’s version of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progess made for BBC television using giant rod puppets played invisibly by the operators using the black theatre technique was a national artistic success. Her actors had to be good mimes and mask players as well as actors and operators. I could supplement this short list with several other performers who have enlivened the contemporary puppet scene, perhaps most notably Christopher Leith, a sculptorpuppeteer whose Beowulf, performed with very large figures hung from the head, Yakshagana-style, was presented by our National Theatre in London and who continues as one of our most active and versatile creators, with a special love of music theatre. But these are enough to indicate the richness of the new talent which sprang up in the fifties and sixties whose names will figure in any history of British puppetry.

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There are now about thirty groups whose work stands out from the rest, chiefly because of their search for new more adventurous themes and their wish to collaborate with actors, directors and designers beyond their own small sphere. Most of them have been able to practise freely their own brand of theatre, from the traditional to the avant-garde. The constraints on the activities of our puppeteers are mostly economical, and the demands made on them are the demands of the marketplace—for example schools nowadays are increasingly likely to buy in shows which will fit into their curriculum. Also, the slowly increasing levels of state subsidy may mean a demand for a particular service—such as community work and workshops, as well as shows—to the region providing the money. Sometimes this results in a severe curtailment of creativity, and the puppeteer may prefer to return to the uncertainty of an independent existence. In the Soviet Union the puppeteers are so well trained and cared for socially, and so well regarded artistically that it may be difficult for our Soviet visitors to understand the extreme precariousness of the existence of western European practitioners. These earn their living as I have indicated from performances and workshops (demonstrating how to make and perform with simple puppets) in schools, in churches and community halls, arts centres and small theatres, at children’s parties, in private homes and at special events such as the growing number of local festivals and festivals abroad. The best of the groups are invited at weekends and school holidays to a network of good theatres where they are assured of an audience and a reasonable fee. These fees are a fraction of those earned by French, German and Dutch puppeteers. The puppet companies obtain bookings by generating their own publicity and mailing their details to very large numbers of head teachers and theatre programmers, municipal entertainment officers, festival organizers and many other categories of potential employers, of whom only a tiny fraction may reply. The majority of the plays are wellknown folk and fairy tales, scripted by the leading puppeteer, who may also have made the figures and the scenery, directed the show and got the bookings. Most of the groups work unbelievably hard. Touring with stage performances can rarely provide more than their bread and butter. The jam lies in television work. Puppets on television are probably a commoner sight in Britain than in any other country. I have already spoken, with some regret, about the BBC’s enormously successful series for the under-fives, but even in the early years of television there were more ambitious puppet ventures, such as the product of Gordon Murray’s marionette theatre within the BBC building in Lime Grove, not for the very young, and the marionette adventure stories of Gerry Anderson which continued for many years and attracted a great following in the sixties and early seventies. In the late seventies Jim Henson set up a base in England and television puppetry was changed for all time with the advent of the Muppets. They were rod- and hand-operated figures performed and filmed with a high degree of professionalism and technical skill never seen here before. Jim Henson needed operators with the sharp reactions and live comedic skills demanded by his puppets. He had to train a number of British players himself. Working with Henson has left its mark on many of the modern puppeteers. Their television training has improved their stage work too. If Andy Pandy convinced many that puppets were only for tiny tots, the satirical series Spitting Image based on the superb three-dimensional caricature models of Fluck and

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Law, has recently convinced others that puppets can appeal to worldly-wise adults too. Spitting Image uses large rod puppets operated to a recorded but highly topical soundtrack and enjoys a huge following of young adults, perhaps a new potential audience for live puppet entertainment. TV advertisements or “commercials” frequently use puppetry and animation of increasing sophistication. Another area of British puppetry which flourishes with no need of assistance from any organization is the perennial and usually traditional one of cabaret and variety. Ultraviolet light (“black light”) acts are common within variety programmes, and in cabaret the English marionette is still the supreme entertainer, in clubs and on cruise ships worldwide. Finally, we may find yet another category, perhaps more than a dozen performing groups, who can claim descendance from the Bread and Puppet Theatre of Peter Schumann—a second source of inspiration from the United States. These—of whom the best known is Welfare State International—use giant figures, and shadows, for their dedicated community work that often conveys a political or celebratory message. The shows, usually outdoors, can be spectacular. I hope I have shown that modern British puppetry holds much of interest, even if it is not so well cared for as that of the Soviet Union: our present world is rich, youthful and vital and full of the promise of new things—techniques, materials and themes. Some traditional puppetry still survives, and the Punch and Judy show has in the last few years started to go back to its roots. The professors have organized themselves within two associations, and are demanding better standards for the Punch and Judy show, in tune with the rest of the contemporary puppet theatre revival. At the end of the sixties the evidence of the new talent resulted in the determination of a large body of puppetry enthusiasts—some practitioners, some educationists, a notable historian, George Speaight, and of course several distinguished puppeteers—to establish a national centre for the support and furtherance of puppet theatre as a whole. In 1972, in pursuit of such a centre, a national festival was staged at a theatre in London, which attracted a considerable audience, for two weeks of performances by leading groups. A direct result of this festival was the offer of a headquarters in Battersea, South London, for a puppet centre; and funds from the Gulbenkian Foundation, the Inner London Education Authority and the Greater London Council were provided to help it to get started. The aim was and is to unite the puppeteers, improve their image and status, generate more work for them, create helpline for the public and puppeteers, a publicly available information and documentation centre, and a publicity exercise on behalf of the admirable work currently in progress. The Puppet Centre, a charity now seventeen years old, is still doing all of these things and encouraging and enabling others to do a great deal more. There are tangible and intangible results of its work. The most obvious are its publications which include a regularly updated Directory of Professional Puppeteers, the journal Animations, which, though modest and seriously underfunded, has found favour in many parts of the world and also the book Aspects of Puppet Theatre published in 1988: seven academic essays by Professor Henryk Jurkowski, UNIMA’s President, which I had the honour to edit.

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Less tangibly, the Puppet Centre has tried to lend unity to the demands of puppeteers for better working conditions, for better rates of pay and recognition of their extraordinary skills. Puppetry, I was told in the seventies, enjoys waves of popularity and fashion. Look, they said, at our history: the renaissance of the sixties and seventies must soon fade. But here we are at the beginning of the nineties, admittedly short of money, without a museum or a central showcase or touring state theatre, and with not even a regular national festival. We desperately need these in recognition of the present status and popularity of our art, and some at least of our energies must be directed towards the achievement of such goals. Nonetheless the future is full of hope and bursting with the promise of a multitude of talents dedicated to the steady development of puppet theatre. These talents are constantly renewed and renewable, with no sign of fading, for all the sad losses and reversals of fortune we always have to bear. I am convinced that the needs of the puppeteers will be met, if the present trends continue—of better (meaning more original and interesting, more technically skilled) performances, and a consistently higher profile in our national artistic life. Contemporary Theatre Review, 1992, Vol. 1, 1 pp. 75–81 Photocopying permitted by licence only

© 1992 Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH Printed in the United Kingdom

Scottish Puppet Theatre: The Reality Behind the Revival Malcolm Knight Scottish Mask and Puppet Centre

This weekend has for me been the culmination of the last ten years of work in Scotland. A dream has been fulfilled. The Soviet International Union of Marionette Artists (UNIMA) delegation has arrived safely for this conference, and the Leningrad State Theatre of Fairy Tales (Skazka) and the Leningrad Puppet Theatre Studio have performed in Glasgow. This dream has become a reality, and may contribute towards a revival of puppet theatre in some small way. The importance of developing working friendships and links with our professional colleagues across cultures is of great importance, just as the development of these links has been seen by UNIMA as a means for promoting international peace and understanding through the puppet theatre since its inception in 1929. What then of the reality beneath this apparent revival of interest in puppetry in Scotland? While I sympathize with the optimism expressed by Penny Francis in her review of the problems and perspectives for British puppet theatre , my optimism is an optimism of will tempered by a pessimism of intellect. It is very difficult to work in the puppet theatre now in the UK and even more difficult to work in Scotland because of the way in which Scottish culture has been subordinated and marginalized since the Act of Union (1801). For this reason, while I will refer to some of the same difficulties that Penny Francis has referred to in her article, I shall also refer to some problems that are particular to Scotland and to the unresolved question of Scottish nationality and the need for a socialist agenda. During the past ten years (1979–1989), a small but significant revival of interest has taken place in puppet theatre within Scotland. The Scottish Puppet Festivals of 1979– 1984, the bi-annual Kirkudbright Festival, and the Edinburgh Puppet Festivals of 1979– 1988 have helped to raise the profile of the art and to stimulate greater public interest. In order to set this development in context it is necessary to outline some of the problems and constraints that have dogged puppetry as an art form for many years. It is commonly believed among those working in the field that there is no real history or tradition as compared with that of eastern Europe or even in England. In fact, however, the dark beginnings of this generally overlooked art are difficult to determine throughout the European tradition. The lack of records and the disappearance of the oral traditions associated with those strolling players and jongleurs who used puppets creates the impression of occasional and scattered traces. The task of searching Scottish archives for official entries concerning the licencing and banning of puppet plays still needs to be undertaken. Woodcuts, engravings and literary reminiscences need to be checked

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together with the public records. Hand puppets were certainly in use in medieval Scotland, as the references within E.K. Chambers’ The Medieval Stage verify. There is more to the puppet traditions of the past than meets the eye. As early as 1848 Punch and Judy shows were being performed at the Glasgow Fair and also in a town near the Trongate, together with other carnival and popular entertainments. In 1920 we find allusions to Punch and Judy showmen at the Crafty in Kirkwall, Orkney. What would a search of other popular markets and meeting places in other areas of Scotland reveal? In the 1930s we discover the Edinburgh puppeteer John Wilson playing and performing puppet shows in schools and hospitals, and working with disabled children. Later the same man took his family and a complete marionette puppet (including Jacko the monkey and Wozzo the Wizard) to Orkney. The Museum of Childhood in Edinburgh houses the Dixon Marionettes from the 1940s as evidence of a full-time professional touring company. In the interwar years the Miles Lee Company was touring with the RAF entertainments section, and went on to found the Belgrave Mews Theatre in Edinburgh (1951–1961), which became the first permanent puppet theatre in the UK. Lee also wrote a standard work called Puppet Theatre Production and Manipulation in 1958 and pioneered the first work in television puppetry in Scotland. The Miles Lee Collection of Puppets and Marionettes (234 wooden figures, complete with booths, properties and business archive) is now housed at the Scottish Mask and Puppet Centre in Glasgow and will soon be placed on permanent display. Another interesting experiment was the work of the Kelvingrove Puppetry Group under the auspices of Ms Nita Crystal from 1943 onwards, which had the main aims of spreading interest and knowledge about puppetry throughout. Glasgow and the west of Scotland, conducting research and experiments in all branches of puppetry, and encouraging the introduction and practice of puppetry within schools. The organization was based in Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery, where performances were regularly given and a film for children was in the process of being made. The work of John Douglas MacGregor between 1930 and 1950 is also now forgotten. MacGregor, a graduate in Decorative Arts from Dundee Art College (1921) became fascinated by popular entertainments, miniature and puppetry. “Mac” went on to design and make his own puppets (marionettes) and scenic backdrops and was committed to developing puppetry in education. In 1942 he helped to establish the Glasgow Puppet Guild in Church Street School with Stuart Beaty (later to become an established painter and sculpter) as one of his first pupils and collaborators. Dr T.J.Honeyman and Mr Samuel Thomson also assisted with the foundation of this guild. It is important to future training and educational development to realize that there is a continuum with the past. Many of the problems faced by puppeteers today were encountered by our predecessors. There is a tradition from strolling players and fit-ups to Punch and Judy and the establishment of the first companies in wartime variety theatre and later with original shows devised for theatre and television. Without such knowledge of the work and struggles of puppetry in Scotland, the companies of tomorrow are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past! Puppetry has been marginalized to a remarkable degree within the postwar subsidized theatre of the UK. Its ancient and popular roots together with its attendant craft and performing skills, have come to be depicted as “only for the kids” and “low-tech” in

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image compared to television and film. Existing theatre courses in colleges, drama schools and universities give it little or no status as a theatre art and no academic respectability. Consequently lack of training and educational provision exists at all levels. The puppet companies themselves have come to have a heavy reliance and overdependence upon a children’s market, which is in turn ill-defined and poorly served by state support. These same companies display weak levels of collaboration and unionization. Almost exclusively they take the form of family businesses working in competitive isolation. They also tend to produce plays of a conservative nature with insufficient innovation and experiment in content and technique. The touring nature of the work and the geographical isolation of many parts of Scotland can be particularly problematic. To date there have been very limited opportunities for work in television, film and the media for such companies (unlike in London and southeast England). Moreover, puppetry as a distinct art form in its own right has received minimal financial investment by the state and other funding agencies. In the case of the Scottish Arts Council this amounts to little more than 0.01% of its total annual budget, even though there are more than thirty small-scale puppet companies in existence. The point is that most of these companies work on the margins of the establishment, and deal every day with problems of inadequate work-space, lack of administrative support, and the everpresent problems of how to set up viable touring schedules and wage structures. The present number of full-time puppeteers in Scotland is estimated to be between thirty-five and forty, and the number of companies and groups to be twenty-three. These figures are taken from Puppeteers across Scotland issued twice yearly by the Scottish Mask and Puppet Centre. Of these groups approximately ten individuals are members of EQUITY (British Actors Equity Assocation) and gained their cards through the Variety Contract. There has been talk recently of a “revival” with a “growing number of Scottish puppeteers” and “every proof that Scottish puppet companies will soon be competing with the more established ones in the U.S. and Europe”. (The Scotsman Magazine, April 1987). The reality is that there has never been a cessation of activity in Scotland in order to merit a revival. The number of puppeteers is neither greater nor less than it was ten years ago. The purpose of the work has never been to “compete” with companies in the US and Europe; by and large, those of us who do the work know that different societies throughout Europe provide a far more conducive environment in which to do the work (i.e. training schools and institutues, more favourable funding and remunerative possibilities, greater emphasis upon innovation in subject matter and material, strong traditions of collaborative work, and a much greater status for the puppeteer and artist). A company in Scotland with more than three professional members is now becoming a rarity. In the last thirty years, perhaps only the Lee Company from Edinburgh between 1951 and 1961 successfully created an international product which could favourably compare with the best work of the US and Europe. In this regard the Lee Company established the first postwar permanent puppet theatre at 3 Belgrave Mews in Edinburgh which was an old converted stable with sixty-six seats and a public theatre licence. Miles Lee attracted the interest of Harro Siegel, John Wright and Sergei Obraztsov. The theatre performed both childrens classics and variety theatre, and also specially commissioned plays from George Scott-Moncrief and Morna Elmhirst. Lee himself wrote a standard

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work on the field, and was a UNESCO adviser in puppetry in India. The work of Lee extended back through the 1930s into the mainstream theatre where he trained as an apprentice with Sir Barry Jackson. He took his experiences of the actor-manager tradition directly into the puppet theatre and was able to attract talented visual artists to work with him. He was an intellectual-artisan in the best tradition of the British Puppet and Model Theatre Guild, and has left behind a significant business archive and range of collected work from other countries. The two longest standing companies in Scotland today are the Purves Puppets and Black Box Puppet Theatre. Both are EQUITY companies with permanent staff and experience of playing in medium- and small -sized venues and schools across the country. After more than twenty years of touring Jill and Ian Purves have realized their dream of a permanent puppet theatre—The Biggar Little Theatre—which opened in 1987. This Victorian family theatre is set in its own grounds beside the house where the Purves live with their two children. The company has a collection of over five hundren puppets and offers a wide variety of classes and craft activities for children and families. The theatre is situated forty miles from Glasgow and thirty miles from Edinburgh in a historic rural village. It seats one hundred people and has an impressive fibre-optic ceiling. The company also operates a touring company (three puppeteers). The building of the theatre was accomplished with financial assistance from the Scottish Development Agency, the Scottish Tourish Board, and the Manpower Servives Commission. The company is also available to tour on the Continent between Easter and the end of September, and they have performed in international festivals in Poland, France, Italy and Ireland. Ian Purves is a former stage manager from Dundee Repertory Theatre and has roots extending back into traditional variety theatre , while his wife Jill supplies both administrative and costuming abilities. The company has finally received recognition from the Scottish Arts Council in the form of a small project grant to assist with the building of additional working workshop facilities. Black Box Puppet Company has been working in Scotland since 1957, and Don and and Ivy Smart have worked from their home (formerly a craft shop and post office) in Taynuilt outside Oban for most of this time. This company is a touring company specialiazing in traditional variety theatre . They have toured widely in Scotland, England and the Republic of Ireland, and have been involved in some fifty programmes for BBC Scotland Gaelic Unit since 1959. They became a charitable trust in December 1982, and have since gone on to receive financial support from the Scottish Arts Council, the Highlands and Islands Development Board, the Western Isles Council and Strathclyde Regional Council. The company usually consists of three puppeteers and a stage manager. The Edinburgh Puppet Company was formed in 1982 by Simon McIntyre and Kim Bergsagel (who served a brief apprenticeship with John Wright and Jane Phillips). Their work has focused on touring in schools and community venues, throughout the Lothian region, and they have undertaken work for the Society for the Mentally Handicapped, St Anns Community Centre and Theatre Workshop. In 1986 their tour of Tam O’Shanter and The Marriage of Rama and Sita was subsidized by the Scottish Arts Council and included five puppeteers. More recently, Kim Bergsagel has become puppeteer-inresidence at the Dr Bell’s Drama Centre in Edinburgh, and the company has been

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considering becoming a limited liability company with charitable status. The company toured successfully in Canada in 1989 and has plans to undertake more touring abroad. Maskot Puppet Theatre is the performing company of the Scottish Mask and Puppet Centre and was founded in 1981 by myself. The first show was an adaptation of Dario Fo’s Mistero Buffo, followed by Cities (1983) in association with the University of Glasgow Department of Drama; Dona Juanita: The Flea (1985) which toured to Germany; The Tale of Old Christopher and Young Rosie by Garcia Lorca (1986) in Strathclyde secondary schools; Black Mask: White Puppets: The Struggle for Namibia (1986) Alice in Wonderland (1988); and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Garcia Marquez in association with the Rostov-on-Don State Puppet Theatre (1991). The company has a policy of tackling work from the popular traditions of puppet theatre with a bias towards the experimental and innovative. It has been funded by Glasgow District Council, Strathclyde Regional Council, the Scottish Arts Council and the British Council. There are also three organizations in Scotland that have organized festivals over the past ten years: Kirkudbright Puppet Festival, Scottish Puppet Festival and the Edinburgh Puppet Festival. Only the first two festivals have received funding from the Scottish Arts Council so far. The Kirkudbright Festival was a biannual festival of long standing organized by the indefatiguable Meta van Delden Paterson. It had strong links with the British Puppet and Model Theatre Guild and UNIMA, and an excellent record on small-scale shows, workshops and exhibitions. The festival was imbued from the beginning with the vision and commitment of its creator. In 1983 the Scottish Arts Council awarded it a grant of £768 which was increased to £841 in 1985. This festival has been traditionally selfsupporting. The Scottish Puppet Festival Association was founded in 1970 and the Scottish Puppet Festival Ltd in 1982. The former was an organization of puppeteers, and the latter was formed as a registered company with charitable status. International festivals were organized in 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982 and 1984 with performances from Albrecht Roser, Coad Canada Puppets, the Carter Family Puppet Theatre, Miniatura from Gdansk (Poland), plus a wide variety of Scottish and English companies. The festivals operated across various regions of Scotland with a central focus on Glasgow and Edinburgh. The work of Neil Wallace, Iain Smith, Peter Scoles, Mike and Pavla Rowan should be acknowledged. The great strength of this development was that it was a festival of puppeteers regulated by an association of puppeteers. Over a six-year period the festival brought in first-rate international companies and raised the status and profile of Scottish puppetry. It received grants of £3000 (1979), £4000 (1981), £5000 (1982), £5000 (1984) and £2000 (1985) from the Scottish Arts Council. It went into financial deficit for the first time in 1984, but the company has survived and will probably be reactivated around future international work in the 1990s. The Edinburgh Puppet Festival was founded in 1985 by Duncan Lowe and Donald Smith of the Netherbow Arts Centre. The Netherbow was first used as a puppet venue in 1984 by the Scottish Puppet Festival, although prior to that it had been used by the Scottish Puppet Festival Association as an occasional venue. The Edinburgh Puppet festival attempted to build on the work of the previous Scottish festivals and inherited a useful programme lay-out and ready-made series of contacts. It received arts sponsorship from the Bank of Scotland in 1986 and has maintained its association with that body ever

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since. The 1987 festival presented a series of over fifty puppet performances during a tenday period. With the exception of the Lempen Puppets from Switzerland and the strong solo shows from Ian Turbitt from Glasgow, the festival has been hallmarked by a certain parochialism and a tendency to focus exclusively on work for children. The formation of the Garret Mask and Puppet Centre in 1981 from a little building in Otago Street over the River Kelvin in Glasgow probably marked a turning point in that it has attempted to establish a year-round programme of activities and support for the art form in its own right. Although not formally a charitable trust with limited liability status until 1985, the Garret aimed to increase the accessibility of mask and puppet work to the general public and has tried to act as a stimulus to the development of research and creative activities. Since its beginnings it has acted as the central information and advisory body for puppet theatre in Scotland and as a linking point between professional, educational, therapeutic and community workers. It prints Puppeteers across Scotland every six months and distributes it free to potential venues and booking organizations. It also runs Independent Learning Courses for adults and children with occasional master courses and international residencies from visiting companies. The centre is the home of the Miles Lee Collection of Puppets and Marionettes and the Lee Archive. The subsidy regulations governing the arts in Scotland have changed considerably over the past ten years. The Local Government Stodart Report from 1981 recommended a greater intervention by local authorities with funding to be devolved away from central government. Thus the Scottish Arts Council has encouraged the formation of selfgoverning limited liability companies with charitable status and a board of directors (no fewer than seven) as the preferred kind of organization. Such organizations are expected to fulfil certain criteria and to manage and take responsibility for their own affairs. This has created a climate in which “partnerships” between central government funding and local authority agencies have become the norm. Such organizations require administrators, press and publicity officers, and an army of ancillary staff to maintain the artists: in many cases, the artists drop from view almost entirely! Moreover, such arts organizations are brought nearer and nearer to dependence on local authority funding and the preferences and views of local politicians. The Garret Trust became the Scottish Mask and Puppet Centre in 1989 when it acquired a new building through the generousity of Glasgow District Council who offered a ninety-nine-year lease with a nominal rental of £1 per year for the first five years. The council is a strong and secure Labour-held seat. The building was an old cleansing depot—although I prefer the expression “purification plant”—and had been subjected to some £80,000 of damage through vandalism. With the help of business sponsorship from Tay Homes (Scotland) plc, a private property developer, with an interest in the site adjacent to the centre, the trust received £25,000. This was matched by a further £25,000 from the Office of Arts and Libraries in London where the project was given a major State Award by the minister of the Arts. Capital funding from Glasgow District Council increased this amount by a further £20,000, and both Glasgow District and Strathclyde Regional Council agreed to provide some modest “seed-bed” and revenue funding. The centre opens now with New Beginnings, the soviet season of Puppetry and this conference. In the words of Martin Luther King (and John Blundall!), I too have a dream. It was a dream of establishing a centre to combat the lack of professional training and the

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poor levels of collaboration between existing puppeteers. It was a dream of establishing a community resource, a work-space where aspiring puppeteers could grow and develop, and a long-term plan for an interactive museum above our heads, an educational institute adjacent to the office complex, and a 250-seat theatre outside in the present car park! It may take two years. It may take ten years, but the lease on this building is for ninety-nine years. The building of a Scottish Centre is just a new beginning, but it is New Beginnings (Glasgow and Strathclyde) Ltd who must be thanked for enabling us to organize and to fund this opening season of Soviet puppetry. This conference would also not have been possible without the generosity of both Soviet and British UNIMA. The centre has come into being against a backlog of twelve years of “free market economics” under a conservative government, with over three million unemployed, an inflation rate subject to constant booms and slumps, and a society where people grapple with a medieval poll tax which evidences an increasing pauperization of working people. New beginnings are very difficult in such times! It is the job of the Scottish centre to revive Scottish puppetry and Scottish traditions of puppeteering. The puppeteer gives life to the inanimate object through the power of imagination, and thereby fights against all those forces which seek to reduce people to objects and to take their life away. At the centre of this struggle for life e is the theme of change and transformation formation—through masks and puppets as the veritable symbols of change and transformation—to bring about a society based upon fulfilment of need not exploitation for profit. In this sense the dialogue with our Soviet colleagues has much to teach us in both negative and positive senses. We hope to develop a new relationship with our friends in the Soviet Union under the spirit of glasnost. Contemporary Theatre Review, 1992, Vol. 1, 1 pp. 83–84 Photocopying permitted by licence only

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Reasons for the Present-Day Situation in Soviet Puppet Theatre Inna Solomonik State Central Puppet Theatre Museum, Moscow

In the autumn of 1988 Moscow audiences were offered a full programme of puppet shows, including performances by the Lele Theatre from Vilnius, a festival dedicated to the seventieth anniversary of Soviet puppet theatres and guest performances by US puppeteer Peter Schumann. At the conference at the end of the festival critics dwelt on the crisis of the Soviet puppet theatre, but they were full of praise for the Lele shows that had preceded the festival. Schumann’s Bread and Puppets shows, which coincided with the festival, aroused everybody’s admiration. The shows themselves and the opinions about them remind one of the circumstances surrounding it and the reasons behind it. This article will consider this matter. It is difficult to agree with opinions about the crisis of the Soviet puppet theatre. Firstly, because a crisis is a momentary state while an overall impression of the shows presented at the festival, by its nature, was not very different to other programmes shown over the past ten to fifteen years, indicating that the situation is stagnant rather than critical. Its most characteristic feature—a liking for puppet shows without, or almost without, puppets—did not start yesterday but has lasted for many years. Secondly, the quality of the festival showed a “normal” rather than a critical picture: in a programme of thirteen to fifteen shows three or four are judged to be good, two or three arouse argument, and two-three are unanimously rejected. What has led Soviet puppet theatre to its present-day situation? In my view the main problem of contemporary puppet theatre—its wish to do without puppets—stems from the fact that the artist is no longer the main character in the creation of a puppet show. Without delving into the depths of history I shall remind the reader that when, at the turn of the century, the decrepit European puppet theatre was in the throes of death it was saved by the infusion of some new blood by the artists. Artists L. Shaporina-Yakovleva, N. and I.Efimov, S.Obraztsov were the forefathers of Soviet puppet theatre. But it so happened that over the years Soviet puppet theatre has been represented by some people who were quite remote from the fine arts. First, there were actors and directors of drama theatres who for some reason or other had failed at drama theatres. They brought the laws of dramatic art to the puppet stage and looked at it through the eyes of a drama actor and director and not an artist. The puppet theatre was gradually turning from an artist’s theatre into a director’s theatre, where instructions were given to artists by directors, who as a rule, had not received any special artistic training. This trouble was worsened by the interference of the governing bodies who adapted the structure of the puppet theatre to that of the drama theatre (and other theatrical organizations) placing a manager (a person concerned with financial affairs), above the director, thus pushing the artist into the

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background. An example of the present situation is the Kustanai puppet theatre that no longer has a head artist, because the manager thinks that he is not necessary and wishes, against the protests of the directors, to strike that post from the payroll. The puppet shows of autumn 1985 reminded us of the simple, obvious, but for some reason ignored truth: puppet theatre is first and foremost an artist’s theatre. The shows created by original artists turned out to be the best at the festival. The Lele and Bread and Puppets theatres are lead by artists. There is much talk about the fact that the director’s role is a complex one that demands some special qualities. For reasons unknown, however, when it is a matter of a puppet theatre people forget that the role of a puppet theatre director is doubly complex as he needs to know not only the laws of the stage, but also the laws of fine arts. Ideally, he must have an art education and to able to think in plastic images. Perhaps one should be thinking of a school training people for the unique profession of puppet theatre director and enrol the students not from among actors, as is usually done nowadays, but from among artists who are not indifferent to puppets. Another source of trouble for the puppet theatre began when it was classed as a children’s entertainment. This most complicated kind of theatre, demanding specially trained audiences for its full appreciation, was thus doomed to oversimplification, to reduction of its potential. Recruits from drama theatres had nothing to do with it. Education science surged into the puppet theatre. And, although the wish of educators to use puppets for educational purposes was noble in itself, the total usurping of the puppet theatre by them, the fact that they reduced the puppet theatre to the status of an art meant exclusively for small children had a detrimental effect on the destiny of our puppet theatre. It has been reduced in no time at all to the status of second-rate entertainment, and the work of puppeteers, for reasons unknown, has become less valued than that of their colleagues working in other branches of the theatre. Isolated from the audiences with whom it could communicate in its complex plastic language, classed at the lowest level of the theatre hierarchy, the puppet theatre has begun to lose the first-class artists, poets and playwrights. Until now, despite breakthroughs of individual companies to adult audiences, the puppet theatre has still not recovered from the harsh blow dealt by victorious educators and won back its audiences lost through the fault of the educators. And, finally, the third problem of the contemporary puppet theatre is neglect of daily training, of improving the skill of puppet manipulation and of dealing with different types of puppets. Ballet dancers know that without daily practice they lose their skill. Puppeteers could not care less. True, this sort of trouble stems from the two problems described above: if there are no real connoisseurs of your art and the puppet itself is missing from the stage, why waste your energy? The present stagnation in our puppet theatre will probably only change under conditions where the artist is put back on the captain’s bridge and puppet art is reinstated as an art for adults. This does not mean, of course, that the puppet theatre cannot be used for educational purposes as well; moreover, children should be introduced to puppet art in the same way they are introduced to ballet, opera, circus and the fine arts. But we must honestly admit that five- or six-year-old audiences are no incentive for the development of puppet art, and the practice of our theatre gives ample proof of that. Puppet theatre is first and foremost an artist’s theatre and only when the artist has the reins, will interest in the puppet and its original plastic behaviour on the stage succeed.

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Notes on Contributors John Blundall (One individual’s view of the value of the study of Russian art and puppet theatre) has been the director and designer for the Canon Hill Puppet Theatre at the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham since 1968. He designed puppets for Gerry Anderson’s Stingray and Fireball XL5. He is the chairman of British UNIMA and president of the British Puppet and Model Theatre Guild. Mr Blundall has a large collection of figures, marionettes and memorabilia relating to puppet theatre, circus and populat theatre. Penny Francis (British puppet theatre: Its present state and future perspectives) is the editor of Animations magazine, which is published six times per year by the Puppet Centre Trust. She is the founder and former general secretary of the organization and is a member of the Professional Training Commission of UNIMA. She is also the editor of Aspects of Puppet Theatre by Henrik Jurkowski (1988). Malcolm Knight (Introduction, and Scottish puppet theatre: The reality behind the revival) is the founder and honorary secretary of the Scottish Mask and Puppet Centre (The Garret Trust, 1981) and a professional theatre director, puppeteer and mask-maker. He is member of UNIMA and president of the International Federation of Centres for Puppetry Arts. Anna Nekrilova (The Leningrad Puppet Theatre and folk tradition) is head of the Museum at the Russian Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences. She has written several books and articles on Russian folklore, folk theatre and puppet theatre. Nelly Polyakova (About my work as a puppet theatre scenographer) is a member of the Artists’ Union of the RSFSR and chief scenographer at the Leningrad State Puppet Theatre. Natalia Raitorovskaya (The artist’s puppet theatre) is an artist, theatre specialist and candidate of arts. She is literary manager at the Moscow Shadow Theatre. Inna Solomonik (Home puppet theatre in pre-revolutionary Russia, The oriental roots of the Soviet rod puppets, and On certain reasons for the present-day situation in Soviet puppet theatre) is research associate with the State Central Puppet Theatre Museum in Moscow. George Speaight (Petrushka and Punch: National traditions and new developments in puppet comedy) is the author of The History of the English Puppet Theatre (1955, 1990) and Punch and Judy. A History (1955, 1970). He is a past chairman of the Society for Theatre Research, vice-president of the British Puppet and Model Theatre Guild and a member of honour of UNIMA. Georgi Turayev (The State Puppet Theatre of Fairy Tales) is a member of honour of UNIMA, founder of Shazka and member of the USSR UNIMA Centre Praesidium.

Notes on contributors

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Bibliography Ashkenazi, Z. (1914) Bessmertnyi Petrushka. Ezhegodnik imperatorskikh teatrov 4, 1–18 (in Russian). Babochkin, B.A., et al. (1937) Russki provintsial’nyi teatr: vospominaniya. Leningrad: Vserossyuskoe teatreal’noe obshchestvo (in Russian). Barnes Steveni, W. (1915) Petrograd. London. Barnes Steveni, W. (1913) Things Seen in Russia. London. Batchelder, M.H. (1947) Efimova and the Russians. In Rod Puppets and the Human Theatre, pp. 172–7. Ohio: Ohio State University Press. Beaumont, C. (1983) The Puppet Stage. London: Studio Publications Inc. Efimova, N.S. (1935) Adventures of a Russian Puppet Theatre. Birmingham, Michigan: Paul McPharlin Puppet Imprints. van Gyseghem, A. (1935) Theatre in Soviet Russia, p. 156, 220. London: Faber & Faber. Kadirov, M. (1979) Th Uzbek Puppet Theatre, p. 19. Tashkent: Uzbek Society for Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries. Kelly, C. (1990) Petrushka: The Russian Carnival Theatre, p. 292. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nekrylova, A.F. (1988) Russkie narodnye gorodskie prazdniki, uveseleniya, i zarlishcha. Leningrad, (in Russian). Nekrylova, A.F. (1989) Kto ukral tramvai. Dramaturgiya 2, 162–71 (in Russian). ISSN 0207– 7698. Moscow. Nekrylova, A.F. (1990) to zhe takoye. Teatr kokol? RS/SR, 208 (in Russian). Obraztsov, C.B. (1982) Puppet Theatre. A Guide to the Moscow State Central Museum. (in Russian). Moscow: Central State Puppet Theatre. Obraztsov, S. (1976) The social significance of puppet theatre in contemporary society. In 12th Congress of UNIMA, p. 12. Moscow: Union International de la Marionette. Obraztsov, S. (1985) My Profession, p. 326. Moscow: Raduga Publishers. Solovyova, N. (1976) The Soviet puppet theatre today. In XIIth Congress of UNIMA, p. 49. Moscow: Union International de la Marionette. The Kemerov Puppet Company (1987) Puppeteers. In Yearbook USSR ‘87, pp. 192–3. Moscow: Novosti Press. Warner, E. (1977) The Russian Folk Theatre. The Hague and Paris. Contemporary Theatre Review, 1992, Vol. 1, 1 p. 88 Photocopying permitted by licence only

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Further Reading The synthetic nature of puppet theatre, with its roots in all the other arts and its wider dimension as a theatre of visual ideology, leads to the necessity for a more extensive bibliography. The following is a list of general references. Benjamin, W. (1972) Illuminations, p. 280. London: Collins/Fontana. Berger, J. (1972) Ways of Seeing, p. 170. London: Penguin. Braun, E. (1979) Meyerhold on Theatre, p. 229. London: Eyre Methuen. Burke, P. (1978) Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. London. Carrell, C. and Young, K. (1989) The Rodchenko Family Workshop, p. 86. Glasgow: New Beginnings (Glasgow and Strathclyde) Ltd and the Serpentine Gallery. Cauldwell, C. (1973) Illusion and Reality, p. 370. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Cliff, T. (1974) State Capitalism in Russia. London. Cooper, J. (1972) Four Russian Plays, p. 394. London: Penguin. Davidow, M. (1977) People’s Theatre: From the Box Office to the State, p. 248. Moscow: Progess Publishers. Deak, F. (1975) The agit-prop and circus plays of Vladimir Mayakovsky. Drama Review 17 (1), 47–52. Eisenstein, S.M. (1988) On the Composition of a Short Fiction Scenario, p. 61. London: Methuen. Evreinoff, N. (1927) The Theatre in Life, p. 296. London: Harrap & Co. Fischer, E. (1963) The Necessity of Art, p. 234. London: Penguin. Gippius, V. (1981) Nikolai Gogol (translated by R. Maguire). Ann Arbor. Glenny, M. (1966) The Golden Age of Soviet Theatre, p. 218. London: Penguin. Gurevitch, P. (1990) Dialogue of Cultures or Cultural Expansion, puppetp. p. 191. Moscow: Progress Publishers. (1962) Gray, C. (Year) The Russian Experiment in Art, p. 296. London: Thames & Hudson. Hauser, A. (1985) The Social History of Art, p. 273. New York: Vintage Books. Krishtoff, L. and Skelley, E. (1990) Perestroika: The Crunch Is Now, p. 441. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Leyda, J. and Voynow, Z. (1987) Eisenstein at Work, p. 162. Calcutta: Seagull Books & London: Methuen. Lifshitz, M. (1972) The Philosophy of the Art of Karl Marx, p. 118. London: Pluto Press. Lunacharsky, A. (1972) On Literature and Art, p. 302. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1976) On Literature and Art, p. 520. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Mikhalkov, S. (1987) On Whose Side Are You Masters of Culture, p. 310. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Panofsky, E. (1987) Meaning in the Visual Arts, p. 407. London: Penguin. Plekhanov, G. (1973) Art and Social Life, p. 80. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Pozharskaya, M.N. (1988) The Russian Season in Paris: Sketches of the Scenery and Costumes 1908–1929. Moscow: Iskusstvo Art Publishers. Schmidt, P. (1981) Meyerhold at Work, p. 241. Manchester: Carcanet New Press. Sytova, A. (1983) The Lubok: Russian Folk Pictures, p. 178. Leningrad: Aurora Art Publishers. Trotsky, L. (1957) Literature and Revolution. New York: Russell & Russell. Worrall, N. (1988) Modernism to Realism on the Soviet Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Further reading

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Conference Participants Karin Andrews, The Barn, Festival Walk, Carshalton, Surrey, UK SM5 3NY Lyn Barbour (artistic director), Orcadia Movement Ltd, 1 Silverknowes Loan, Edinburgh, UK John Blundall (director), Cannonhill Puppet Theatre, The Midlands Arts Centre, Cannonhill Park, Birmingham, West Midlands, UK Patricia Brennan, Hand-in-Hand Puppets, 15 Milverton Road, Manchester, UK M14 5PL Stuart Brown (student), 21 Bradfield Avenue, Glasgow, UK Barbara Cherbanich (freelance interpreter and liaison facilitator), 9 Rugge Drive, Norwich, UK NR4 7NJ Stuart Cherry, 108 Manchester Drive, Glasgow, UK Peter Clancy (volunteer), Scottish Mask and Puppet Centre, 8–10 Balcarres Avenue, Glasgow, UK G12 0QF Ray and Joan Da Silva, Da Silva Puppet Company, The Limes, Norwich Road, Marsham, Norfolk, UK NR10 5PS Lyn Dunachie, Glasgow Museum Education Service, 12 Rowallan Gardens, Glasgow, UK G11 7LJ Ruth Frame, Orcadia Movement Ltd, South Lodge, Sauchieburn, Stirling, UK FK7 9QE Penny Francis, Puppet Centre Trust, Battersea Arts Centre, Lavender Hill, London SW11, UK John Hoey (manager), Craigsfarm Community Development Project Ltd, Maree Walk, Craigs Hill, Livingston, West Lothian, UK Anna Ingleby (freelance designer/artist), 64 Ashburton Road, Glasgow, UK G12 0LZ Margaret Ker (staff tutor, Expressive Arts, SRC Dumbarton), Scottish Mask and Puppet Centre, 253 Garrioch Road, Glasgow, UK G20 8QZ Malcolm Knight (manager/director), Scottish Mask and Puppet Centre, 8–10 Balcarres Avenue, Glasgow, UK G12 0QF Carolyn Lambert, Lambert Shadow Puppets, 16 Ewing Street, Kilbarchan, UK PA10 2JA Johanne Laurie, Theatre Museum, 1E Tavistock Street, Covent Garden, London, UK Robert Milne (technical director), Orcadia Movement Ltd, 1 Silverknowes Load, Edinburgh, UK Isobel Moore (freelance designer), 2F2, 33 Gardners Crescent, Edinburgh, UK Anna Nekrilova, Russian Institute, USSR Academy of Sciences, USSR Irene Pavlcheva (translator and playwright), Skazka Theatre, Flat 7, House N13, Krukova Street, 195268 Leningrad, USSR Nelly Polyakova (designer), Shazka Theatre, Flat 141, N2, Tchaikovsky Street, 181187 Leningrad, USSR Natalia Raitorovskaya (literary mananger), Moscow Shadow Theatre, Moscow, USSR Carolyn Rankin (interpreter), New Beginnings, 60 Breval Crescent, Hardgate, Clydebank, UK Anne Ross (administrator), Scottish Mask and Puppet Centre, 8–10 Balcarres Avenue, Glasgow, UK G12 0QE David Roy (technical designer), Scottish Mask and Puppet Centre/Theatre Nepotism, 30 Dixon Avenue, Crosshill, Glasgow, UK Laura Shirley (puppet maker), Biggar Little Theatre/Purves Puppets, 11 High Street, Biggar, Lanarkshire, UK. Iain Smith (puppeteer), Storytime Puppets, 102 Kenmure Street, Glasgow, UK Inna Solomonik (research associate), State Central Puppet Theatre Museum, 37–56 Bolshoi Tichinsky, 123557 Moscow, USSR George and Mary Speaight (writer/historian), 6 Maze Road, Kew Gardens, Richmond, Surrey, UK TA9 3DA

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Georgi Turayev (founder of Skazka), The Soviet Culture Fund, Leningrad Office, 31 Nevsky Prospekt, Leningrad, USSR. Ian Turbitt (puppeteer), Handyworks Puppet Company, 281 Kenmure Street, Glasgow, UK Gerard Watters (volunteer), Scottish Mask and Puppet Centre, 8–10 Balcarres Avenue, Glasgow, UK G12 0QF Simon Western (community/nurse/therapist), Alderhay Hospital, Eaton Road, Liverpool, UK L12 2AP Contemporary Theatre Review, 1992, Vol. 1, 1 pp. 91–96 Photocopying permitted by licence only

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Index Academy of Arts, The 33 Act of Union (1801) 75 Actor-Manager tradition 78 Adventures of the Puppy Druzhok, The 52 Advocate Patlin 30 Agur, Rein 53 Akimov, Nikolay 64 Aladdin and His Magic Lamp 37 Alekseev, Nikolai 31 Alexandrinsky Theatre 28 Alyonooshka and the Soldier 51 Andersen, Hans Christian 51 Anderson, Gerry 72 Andy Pandy 69 Animations 53, 73 Appolo 29 Apricot Tree, The 23 Arab 13 Arts Council of Great Britain 68 Arina, The 23 Arisiophanes 32 Armenia 4 Arnoldy, Professor V 38 Aronoff, Mickey 3 Art for art’s sake 9 Art School on Strike 28 Artistic metaphor 35 Aspects of Puppet Theatre 73 Azov, Vladimir 29 Baba-Yaga 37 Baby 12 Baltic States 4 Bakst 7, 57 Bakunin 38 Ballet Russe 57 Barbour, Lynn 8 Baroque 32 Bartholomew Fair 11 Baum, F 64 BBC 69 Scotland Gaelic Unit 78

Index

Bear, The 45 Beaty, Stuart 76 Beckett 70 Belgrade 51 Belgrave Mews Theatre 76 Bely, Andrei 28 Benois, Alexander 6, 12, 31, 57 Bergsagel, Kim 78 Berkov, Pavel 20 Bestuzhev, Sasha 26 Bezzoubtsev, N 40 Biggar Little Theatre, The 78 Binyon, Helen 68 Black theatre 50 Black Box Puppet Theatre 78 Blackham 68 Blok, Alexander 31 Blundall, John 7, 71 Bogatyrev 20 Bolshoi Theatre of Leningrad 4 Borovkov, Nikolay 53, 63 Bread and Puppet Theatre 73 British Puppet and Model Theatre Guild 67 Bunyan, John 71 Bulgarian Festival of Plays 53 Byelorussia 21 Byrom, Michael 14 Cabaret 73 Café Pittoresque 14 Callot 25 Cannonhill Puppet Theatre 7 Caricature Theatre of Wales 71 Carter Family Puppet Theatre 79 Catharsis 16 Chambers, E K 75 Chekhov, Anton 43 Chemiyak, Ekaterina 49 China 37 Chinaman 13 Chinese puppet shows 12 Chukovsky Tales 65 Cities (1983) 79 Civil War 19 Clay toys 52 Clown 12, 16 Coad Canada 79 College of Punch Professors 15 Comic hero 11 Crafty 76 Craig, Edward Gordon 6, 28

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Index

Crocodile 12 Crystal, Nita 76 Culture Club 51 Dahl, Roald 71 Devil 12 Diaghiley 7 Directory of Professional Puppeteers 73 Dixon Marionettes, The 76 Dobuzhinsky, Mstislav 6, 31, 64 Doctor 12 Dog (Toby) 12 Dona Juanita : The Flea 79 Dostoevsky 12 Drittenpreis, P 29 Edinburgh Puppet Company 78 Edinburgh Puppet Festivals of 1979–1988 75 Educational Puppetry Association 69 Efimov, Ivan 31, 33 Efimova, Nina Simanovich 5, 33 Eisenstein 7 Eliseev, Yuri 50, 65 Elizabethan drama 11 Elmhirst, Moma 77 EQUITY (British Actors Equity Association) 77 Eremin 20 Escurial 45 Estonia 53 Exter, Alexandra 7, 57 Fairy tales 54 Fall of Troy, The 27 Faulty Optic 71 Favorsky 31 Fedotov, A 40 Filimoshka 13 Filshtinsky 53 Finist—The Bright-Eyed Falcon 24 First State Marionette Theatre in Leningrad 33 Flowerpot Men 69 Fluck and Law 72 Fo, Dario 79 Folk Theatre Studio 22 Foreigner or Black Man 12 Forschtedt, V 29 Francis, Penny 7 Free-market 8 From the Haven of Liverpool 53

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Index

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Galanty Show 67 Gapit 40 Garret Mask and Puppet Centre 79 Gartman 31 Gaush 31 Gernet, Nina 51 Georgia 4 Ghelderode, Michel de 45 Ghost of Judy 12 Gilody, Elena 49 Gindin 52 Glasgow District Council 79 Glasgow Fair 76 Glasnost 4 Glove puppet 11 Gnesian, Evgenia 27 Gondla 30 Gonzalez, Michael 3 Gorbachev 4 Gordon Murry’s marionette theatre within the BBC building in Lime Grove 72 Gozzi 29 Greater London Council 73 Green Bird 29 Green Blood, The 41 Grigorovich, D V 12 Gulbenkian Foundation 73 Gumilyov, Nikolai 30 Hagemann 38 Hamlet 58 Hangman 12 Henson, Jim 72 Hermit and the Bear, The 30 Herzen 25 Highlands and Islands Development Board 78 Hogarth Puppets 68 Honeyman, Dr T J 76 Household Theatre of the Nursemaid Arina 23 Hump-backed Horse, The 48, 52 I’ll Tell the World a Two 52 Iago 12 Ignatiev, Igor 53 In Man All Should Be 43 India 37 Indonesia 37 Inner London Education Authority 73 Inquisitive Magician, The 51 Institute for the Aesthetic Development of Children 7, 59 Institute of Theatre, Cinema and Music 23 Italian masque comedy 29

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Ivanova, Natalia 64 Jackson, Sir Barry 78 Javanese wayang 28, 38 Jew 13 Jongleurs 75 Jonson, Benn 11 Judy 12 Kalmakov 31 Karandash 16 Karsavina, Tamara 27 Katayev, Valentin 27 Kaverin, Veniamin 50 Kelly, Catriona, Petrushka: The Russian Carnival Theatre (1990) 5 Kelvingrove Puppetry Group 76 Kharkov University 38 Khusid, Mikhail 6 Kichanova 51 Kinovitch, Vadim 6, 24 Kipling, Rudyard 53 Kirkudbright Festival 75 Kirkudbright Puppet Festival 79 Kirkwall 76 Klee 31, 68 Konstantinovskaya 49 Korogodsky, Zinovy 64, 65 Kozlov 52 Kravchenko, Boris 52 Krylov 30 Kurochkin, Vassily 27 Kustani puppet theatre 84 Lame Duck, The 53 Lanchester 68 Leger 31 Leith, Christopher 71 Lele Theatre 83 Lemercier de Neuville 28 Lempen Pupets 79 Leningrad Circus 17 Leningrad Palace of Pioneers 49 Leningrad Puppet Theatre Studio 3 Leningrad Theatre for Young Spectators 64 Leningrad Theatre of Fairy Tales (Skazka) 3 Lermontov, Misha 26 Liandsberg, Olga 49 Lifshitz 51 Lissitzsky 7 Lithuania 35 Little Angel Theatre 70

Index

Llubimov, Yuri 58 Lodiy, Zoya 31 London Marionette Theatre, The 67 Lopukhin 51 Lorca, Garcia 79 Lowe, Duncan 79 Lubok 19 Lukull’s Bride, The 65 Luther King, Martin 80 Macbeth 34 MacGregor, John Douglas 76 Magic Events at the Museum 63 Magician of the Emerald City 46 Maikhrovsky, Yevgeny 16 Malinovskaya, S 40 Malo Pozorishte Puppet 51 Manpower Services Commission 78 Marginalized 76 Mariinsky Ballet School 27 Marionette 80 Marionette plays 11 Marquez, Gabriel Garcia 3 Marriage of Rama and Sita, The 78 Martchevski, Anatoli 16 Maskot Puppet Theatre 78 Masks 50 Matchmaker 13 Matter 35 Matveev, German 50 Mayakovsky 7 Mazuras, Vitalis 35 McIntyre, Simon 78 Medieval morality plays 11 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 31 Midlands Arts Centre 7, 60 Miles Lee Collection of Puppets and Marionettes 80 Miles Lee Company 76 Milton, Ted 70 Miniatura from Gdansk 79 Mir Iskusstva (The World of Art) 6, 32 Mistero Buffo 79 Moiseyev, Igor 56 Monk 13 Moscow Art Theatre 15 Moscow Fellowship of Artists 14 Moscow State Central 4 Moscow State Circus School 7 Muffin the Mule 69 Münich artists 28 Muppets 72

95

Index

96

Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography in Leningrad 38 Museum of Childhood in Edinburgh 76 National Ethnography Museum 20 Nationalism 8 Nativity plays 21 Naturalism 20 Nekrylova, Anna 6 Nemirovitch Danchencko Theatre 56 Neslukhovskaya 31 Netherbow Arts Centre 79 New Beginnings (Glasgow and Strathclyde) Ltd 3, 80 Nikolayev, Alexander 50 Notes of a Glove-Puppeteer, The 34 Novatsky 51 Oberon’s Magic Horn 27 Object 35 Obraztsov, Sergei 4, 5 Odoyevsky, Fyodor 27 Office of Arts and Libraries 80 Olearius 12 Olesha, Yuri 50 Ombres Chinoises 67 One Hundred Years of Solitude 3 Orcadia Movement 8 Oriental rod puppet 40 Orkney 76 Othello 12 Palchinskaite 52 Palchinskayte, Violetta 63 Pascar, Henriette 14 Perestroika 4 Petersburg Organ-Grinders, The 12 Petrov, Valery 64 Petrov, N 28 Petrushka 5 Petrushka and Punch 5 Phillips, Jane 71 Philpott, Violet 70 Philpott, A R (Panto) 69 Picasso 31, 68 Pierrot 14 Pioneer Palace 51 Pogodin, Nikolai 52 Policeman 12 Polyakova, Nelly 7, 51, 53 Popov 16 Popova, Liubov 7, 58 Postnikov 27

Index

Power of Love and Magic, The 29 Priesthill Puppets 8 Priestley, J B 6, 42, 53 Prince Lutonya 27 Proposal, The 45 Pulcinella 11 Pulcinello 5 Punch and Judy Fellowship 6, 15 Puppet Centre Trust 7 Puppeteer-actor 61 Puppeteers across Scotland 77 Purves Puppets 78 Pushkin, Alexander 58 Pygmalion 64 Queen Frog, The 51, 52 Rag Seller 13 Raitorovskaya, Dr Natalia 6 Rayok 52 Red Petrouchka Theatre 40 Reiniger, Lotte 68 Relative autonomy 9 Roser, Albrecht 79 Roston-on-Don 3 Rostov State Puppet Theatre 3 Rout of Presnya, The 28 Rowan, Mike 79 Rowan, Pavla 79 Rumyantsev Museum 38 Ruslan and Ludmila 27 Russian Federation 4, 50 Saeolz’s Petrushka 27 Saltykov-Shedrin 65 Sand, Maurice 28 Sarukhanov, Valery 64 Savchuk, Lyudmila 23 Sazonov, P 29 Scarlet Flower, The 52 Schumann, Peter 73 Schwartz, Evgeny 50 Scoles, Peter 79 Scott-Moncrief, George 77 Scottish Arts Council 77 Scottish Development Agency 78 Scottish Mask and Puppet Centre 3, 77 Scottish Puppet Festival Association 79 Scottish Puppet Festival Ltd (1982) 79 Scottish Puppet Festivals of 1979–1984 75 Scottish Tourist Board 78

97

Index

Serov, Valentin 27, 29 Seton, Maria 60 Shadow theatre 50 Shadows 65 Shakespeare 32 Shaporina, Yulia 49 Shapovalova, Galina 22 Shaw, George Bernard 68 Shepovalov 53 Shpet, Lenora 59 Siegel, Harro 77 Signoret 28 Simmonds 67 Simonovich, N 25 Sinakevich 52 Skazka 6 Slonimskaya, Yu 29 Slonimskaya, Yulia 38 Small Tiger Petrik 63 Smart, Don and Ivy 78 Smith, Donald 79 Smith, Iain 8, 79 Smith, Barry 15, 70 Snegurochka (by Ostrovsky) 66 Snoggle, The or Green Blood 6 Society of Guignol’s Friends in France 29 Society of Tehantch’s Friends in Belgium 29 Solomonik, Dr Inna 4 Somov, Constantin 58 Soviet Puppet Theatre Today, The by N Solovyova 4 Sooty 69 Speaight, George 73 Spitting Image 16, 72 Stanislavsky 56 State Central Puppet Theatre Museum 37 State planning 9 State regulation 9 Stodart Report 80 Strathclyde Regional Council 78 Stravinsky, Igor 32 Strelnikov, Alexej 22 Sudarushkin, Victor 65 Sudeikin, S 29 Summer camp 51 Swazzle 11 Tale of Old Christopher and Young Rosie 79 Tale of the Beast Called Indrik, The 52 Tam O’Shanter 78 Tartar 13 Tay Homes (Scotland) plc 80

98

Index

Teschner, Richard 6 Thomson, Samuel 76 Toff 13 Tolstoy, Sofya Andreevna 27 Tolstoy, Leo 26 Toy Ball, The 27 Toy Theatre 67 Training courses 70 Travels in Strange Countries 37 Tsar-Maiden 27 Tsar Peter the Great 19 Tsvetkov 53 Turayev, Georgi 6, 49 Turbitt, Ian 79 Tuzlukov, Boris 35 Tyshler 31 Ukraine 21 UNIMA, British 7 UNIMA 3 UNIMA, 12th Congress of 4 UNIMA, Soviet Centre in Moscow 3 Unusual Concert, The 16 USSR Conference of Soviet Puppet Theatres 40 Vakhtangov, Evgeny 29 van delden Paterson, Meta 79 Variety 73 Varna 53 Vaysbrem, Pavel 64 Vedomosti 19 Vertep 6 Victorian pantomimme 70 Vilnius 83 Volkov, Vladimir 50 Voronezh 40 Vsevolodsky-Gerngross 20 Vyborg 23 Wallace, Neil 79 Welfare State International 73 Wedding, The 45 Western Isles Council 78 Whanslaw 68 What a Bloke, Balda! 52 Where are You Running to, Little Colt? 52 White Envelope among Yellow Leaves 64 Wild One, The 53 Wilkinson, Walter 15, 67 Wilson, John 76 Winter’s Tale 66

99

Index

Wonders at the Museum 52 Wooden Horse Theatre 6 Woodentops 69 Wright, John 70, 77 Yakovleva, L 29 Yakovleva-Shaporina, L 30 Yakulov, George 57 Yeliseev, Yuri 63 Yeltsin 4 Yugoslavia 51 Zaitsev, Ivan 5 Zhukhovitsky 52 Zigmund, Christofer 19

100

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