It is often said that there is not enough puppetry for adults in theatre, and it can certainly be difficult to find performances that use the full potential of puppetry for tackling serious themes.
Thankfully there is hope at Bedlam Theatre, where Edinburgh-based company Tortoise in a Nutshell are making full use of this often misused artform with their show Grit. Bringing together a series of tales told through the eyes of a war photographer – whose voiceover reflects on scenes enacted by the three, mostly silent, puppeteers on stage – Grit skilfully assembles a powerful piece of theatre that tells the stories of children involved in war.
The production is arresting from the very beginning, when a puppet woman goes through the absent photographer’s belongings. The puppeteers all have such a skilful touch and devoted focus on the puppets that you can’t help but be drawn in instantly.
Later the company display great ingenuity as they use drawn images cast from an overhead projector on stage. These are caught on small hand-held screens – a simple trick that makes the images of war feel as if they are floating suspended in mid-air, while the manipulation of the focus on the projector allows the company to zoom in and out on the pictures to great effect.
We also see Tortoise in a Nutshell display a skilful manipulation of tone in a scene where a small puppet boy plays in the sand. His carefree laughs warm the audience to the character, who acts as a sort of everyboy, representing the innocence of youth that lies at the heart of the entire production. Slowly, as barbed wire intrudes upon his playground and his toys are exchanged for instruments of war, we feel the joyful play undercut by the dawning of a grim reality. This poignant moment is punctuated perfectly as the boy soldier picks up a rifle and makes his first kill, the sequence a near perfect example of the potential of such a playful theatrical form to tackle serious themes.
The production continues to explore the form of puppetry as it tells the tale of Aki, a boy who spent his youth laying mines and his adulthood removing them. This powerful tale is told through shadow puppetry, the change in aesthetic keeping the audience enraptured by the ingenuity of the stagecraft.
The show culminates in a visually stunning scene in which a paper city unfolds from cardboard boxes and moves gradually from civil disturbance to martial law. The form is continually explored and developed and by the end we find ourselves in a half-cartoon paper theatre reminiscent of the graphic novelPersepolis.
It could have been so easy for the company to focus on the morbid nature of the subject matter and to play on our emotions by telling us how sad it all is. But the style of presentation is playful and entertaining, with the touch of magic that good puppetry provides. It never undermines the topic but provides a contrast, a small gap in-between seeing and understanding that allows us to reflect for ourselves upon the sadness that lies beneath the surface.
The well-crafted soundtrack provides a superb underscore to the action and moves from beautiful to haunting, and by the end, as the paper buildings fall in a cloud of dust and our narrator reaches the climax of his story, the gravity of the piece takes hold.
Perhaps there could have been more room for the three skilled performers to show more of themselves, to step away from the puppets for longer. The voiceover can also be a little heavy-handed at times, clearly acted and lacking in the realism that could have given the piece greater punch. But overall this is a truly striking and accomplished piece of visual theatre, and I left with a renewed faith in the potential of puppetry.