Author Archives: Darren East

About Darren East

Darren East is a theatre maker and puppeteer, co-founder of Unpacked Theatre Company, co-director of TouchedTheatre and recently co-founder of Third Hand, the UK's only dedicated puppetry and opera company, with whom he won the Off West End Award for Best Opera Production. He teaches regularly, including with the Brighton Puppetry School.

Vamos Theatre: Finding Joy

Vamos is a young company working with an old craft, using full-mask performers, reminiscent of Trestle or Famile Flöz. In Finding Joy four of them deliver an array of non-speaking characters to tell the story of an elderly woman in the early stages of dementia, the frustrations of both her home life and her grim stay in hospital, and her growing redeeming relationship with her grandson and his teenage friends. In classic visual theatre style, it also dips back into her past to share key life events.

It feels slightly old-fashioned in part because (even though leavened with well-chosen additions of puppetry, of film projection) it is a sustained piece of a performance craft – the mask work is not an effect, a tool, it’s the core of the piece. This wordless form relies on a constant stream of recognitions of action from the audience, identifying what characters are doing, and what they are feeling, and what they are communicating to us, and to each other, and why. When it works well, as it does here, it effectively delivers a flow of pleasurable rewards, of ‘oh yes, that’s what she’s doing’ moments, and it’s completely engaging. Pulling it off demands a host of performance skills – the mask classically demands full and precise physicality for each different character, alongside a serious clown openness to audience that takes in both high comedy and pathos; and precision timing is essential.

But I found myself wondering, in this show, whether the form might be restrictive of the breadth of content that it can embrace. There were moments where what we were shown seemed really well-observed: I was sitting in front of a row of NHS employees who collapsed as one with laughter on the swaggering entrance of the self-important senior consultant on his ward rounds. Clearly something particularly identifiable there. But other characters felt a bit generic; we’re perhaps always going to more quickly latch onto stock teenagers than the complex mess of a group of real ones. Particularly after the interval, the same seemed to be true of the narrative content; there was rather a run of slightly-implausible heart-warming set-pieces, that hit the recognition spot more via Hollywood than reality. The show seemed to demand an increasingly sweet tooth; apart from one climactic anxious moment, the dementia symptoms kept pretty much within the spectrum of charming minor frustrations, which is not, I am sure, the full experience.

But ultimately this is the sweet story Vamos have chosen to tell, and they execute it absolutely flawlessly. The Warren, with its raised stage set well back from the seating bank, is not an easy space for detailed, intimate theatre, but they overcome this effortlessly. The numerous characters are all fully embodied and precisely identifiable; every beat is crisp and clear, the storytelling takes new turns and injects little surprises, and switches from the comic to the emotive, exactly when needed. This is unpretentious and very well made theatre.

Theatre-Rites: Rubbish

In Theatre-Rites’s show (for children 5+, and everyone older), made last year and now touring the UK, four “excavators” – steampunky characters in a particular and powerfully imagined world – explore an impressive mountain of black bin bags. As they work through their conflicts and alliances, they uncover various objects that – animated as puppets – bring their own stories to the fore.

Director and leader of Theatre-Rites, Sue Buckmaster, has spoken of the piece’s “object-driven” dramaturgy, and this runs through Rubbish with an absolute clarity. It’s there, of course, in the puppetry, which is brilliant – every beat is clear, precise and playful, alive – and it works outwards through the gentle clownish presence and sharp interaction of the excavators, and through to the almost-preposterous heap of rubbish that forms the set, inviting climbing, delving, and exploration.

This attention to detail allows the puppetry, in particular, to reach for some big ideas while being rooted in the entertaining moment. There is, for example, a little teapot duck, who is rinsed of the dark gunk he comes out of his black bag covered in. He can, if we want him to, stand up for every oil-slicked seabird we’ve seen; he’s also a warm and witty presence who waddles off happily.

In this way, Rubbish is never didactic; it has no need to be. Even a gleeful audience-participation recycling-sorting sequence avoids it through the strength of the puppet character at its heart. And a lot of what comes out of the rubbish bags is not garbage, per se, but antiquated objects of faded beauty, and they send the piece into richer territory: there are questions quietly asked about aging, about loss, about a much wider sense of what is discarded in our culture.

The small frustrations of the piece are related to the strength of the object-driven dramaturgy – the puppet-objects (and arguably the excavator characters) are so much themselves that there is, for me, not enough consequence to, and between, their stories: I craved a little more narrative drive. The one moment that really didn’t come off was when a grand lamp, contrived of excavated rubbish, was given a little too much assistance by a piece of theatre technology that felt as though it arrived from outside its world. There’s an odd sonic gear-change (from Jessica Dannheisser’s potent soundtrack) at the very end of the piece.

But the rewards of this logic are very great. The story of a single glove in search of its partner becomes a miniature epic, a tour de force of puppetry and ensemble theatre – the performances throughout the piece are impeccable – as the rest of the company build the worlds of its journey swirling around it. It opens your heart like, well, a mysterious bag of possibilities. The show may not be perfect (and a show called Rubbish probably doesn’t aspire to that), but – like the surprising treasures in its bin bags – it is precious, and profound, and playfully inspiring.

Untied Artists: For Their Own Good

Untied Artists’ remarkable show – a Bitesize commission that won a Fringe First in Edinburgh this year – is a welcome element of London’s Suspense Festival of puppetry for adults.

The central story is of Tom (Jake Oldershaw), an older knackerman responsible for putting down horses that are lame, sick or simply not productive enough to be worth the cost to their owners of keeping them. He has a young apprentice Scott (Jack Trow), who merely told the job centre he wanted to work with animals, and is thus a useful foil for explaining Tom’s work. Tom’s neither callous nor sentimental; he plays air guitar along to the radio when he’s alone in the abbatoir, and he casually despatches rats. But he is a believer in the knackerman’s creed: he takes responsibility for giving the animals a good death.

Overlaid with this narrative thread are voiceovers of people who work with death – doctors, butchers, vets – the unvarnished source material of the piece, perhaps; there are also numerous little inner-lit cardboard houses, each holding a story of a death, or of many deaths, human and animal. These punctuate the piece, each plainly related before its light is extinguished. The radio relentlessly plays snippets of mordant songs, from Folsom Prison Blues (‘I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die…’) to (I Just) Died in Your Arms. The company know very well how to balance these stylised elements with naturalism – stage left is Tom’s kitchen, where he fries real onions; stage right the steel furniture of the abbatoir, where the horses’ blood is pink sand.

And in the midst of this is the central puppet figure – a near-life-size horse, wicker-work and blankets, animated extremely effectively from a simple head control and a rope through a pulley that also serves to suspend it after death. Nothing is more alive than a well-animated puppet, this horse flicking its head, shuffling its feet, looking around its world. Nothing more dead than a puppet slumped to the ground, or hung up to be dismembered.

And this puppet horse dies many deaths as Tom and Scott discuss the ways and the responsibilities of killing. A gunshot to the head may be kinder than a lethal injection, an innovation demanded by modern sensibilities; they demonstrate the difference between the former’s sharp drop and the latter’s slow, slurred, sinking. Tom gives a running commentary of the banalities – simple fears and simple comforts – that he thinks run through the horse’s mind in the seconds before it is shot, making the point, viscerally, that the difference between humans and animals is that we know what’s coming, and they don’t. Scott’s first attempt at putting down the horse goes slightly wrong and the puppetry makes agonising the couple of seconds before he can finish the job.

This discussion inexorably closes in, perhaps slightly too rapidly, slightly too neatly – the show could stand to take more time over its main protagonist’s story – to the question of what makes a good death for a man. The question of who is responsible for making it possible.

It is great to see a show that uses puppetry sparingly, and wisely: to tell the pieces of the story that are best told in this form, to share the moments of life and death that puppetry, by its nature, can illuminate acutely. And to see a show about death that is truthful, complex and utterly unsentimental, and all the more moving and thought-provoking for that.

Total Theatre