Every year Horse + Bamboo organise a puppet festival at their base in Waterfoot, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it town on the road to Bacup which is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it town on the road to Todmorden.

Put simply, the festival is a little gem and features indoor ticketed shows and free outdoor work. So the audience gets to see a wide variety of puppet theatre.

This year they kicked off with the Theatre Ballads, a work in progress  where Horse + Bamboo collaborate with singer/violinist Bryony Griffiths  and singer Kate Lockley.  It features a  sequence of folk songs in which women turn the table on the social attitudes of the time, the songs enhanced with puppetry and filmed animation.  There’s work still to be done, but it’s strong start – the suitcase puppet show for a song about a female pirate has nice detail and design. The final song about a punch-up over the Franco-Prussian war has a flip chart of large illustrations which look like they were taken from a newspaper of the time – were it not for the occasional BIFF! Or POW! that have sneaked into the drawings.

The following night saw Pickled Image present Coulrophobia. Two  ambivalent clowns at the mercy of how clowns are supposed to behave, in a cardboard imitation of the world. The set is inventive and conceals surprises at every turn, there’s a Punch and Judy style show within the show which is both brutal and cruel, and the performing is spot-on throughout – every facial tic and twitch reads. It’s both cheap and literate in its humour, definitely not for family audiences. With the right producer this is a show that could easily become a left-field hit in the manner of Shockheaded Peter.

Multi-instrumentalist Chris Davies composed and played a live musical soundtrack to Lotte Reiniger’s classic film The Adventures of Prince Achmed.  The technique is simple – animated silhouettes with a few camera lens/superimposition effects – but there’s a lot of nuance in how the characterisation is achieved and how the different settings for the story are realised. The music keeps pace with the non-stop invention on the screen with themes and rhythms played on a laptop providing a base for improvisations for flute, soprano sax and oud .

Shona Reppe presented The Curious Scrapbook of Josephine Bean,  a theatrical detective story where a ‘scientist’ pieces together the life of someone using a scrapbook and found objects as evidence. Shona is an incredibly engaging performer, the story twists and turns in unexpected ways and the objects/clues are enhanced by projections which allow you to see very small  and crucial details. In the manner of all good detective stories it kept you hanging in there until the end.

The final show was The Man Who Planted Trees by Puppet State. A lot has been written already about this show (which won a Total Theatre Award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe a few years ago). What made it  really work was having the story undermined by a puppet dog who seemed to be channelling  the anarchic ‘I’m not entirely in this show’ spirit of Bill Murray at his best. Of course the message of the story wasn’t undermined at all but whenever it risked becoming too worthy the dog reappeared to add a  comic twist to the proceedings.

These five shows alone would make the festival outstanding. But the best festivals aim to create a full-on festive atmosphere rather than just present a series of shows. So alongside the indoor shows was a cabaret where puppet shows knocked together quickly out of cardboard were presented with German cabaret songs (some of the shows were created in the half-time interval); an outside  gallery of sideshows where, courtesy of headphones issuing instructions, one member of the audience does a show for another member of the audience; and a small series of intimate shows created by artists being mentored by Horse + Bamboo, who also premiered a new street show and a community parade made over the weekend.

Outward looking, entertaining, provocative at times, inventive and imaginative. We need more of this kind of culture. When it’s presented in an out of the way, unremarkable town like Waterfoot, which has not fared well in this age of austerity, it makes the experience all the more vivid.

 Puppet Festival ran atThe Boo, Waterfoot 14–17 July 2016. 

Featured image (top) Pickled Image: Caulrophobia

Two men are sitting down with a large painting of what could be an aerial view of a battleground on their laps. All you can see of them is their legs and all you can hear is a rendition of It’s a Long Way to Tipperary. Due to an itchy foot the song stalls on the word ‘long’ and it’s repeated as if the record is scratched until the shoe and sock are taken off, the itch is relieved, and the shoe and sock are put back on. As this happens I turn round and see the audience of 80+ people hanging on every ‘long’ and being perfectly happy to have their patience stretched to the very limit.

This is a small sequence in Desperate Men’s current show Slapstick and Slaughter which allows them to use their considerable skill and experience to entertain an audience via the medium of dadaist provocation. The noise poetry of Kurst Schwitters is evoked, turn-of-the-20th-century drawing-room drama gets a mauling, and nonsensical non-sequiturs hang in the air

I saw Slapstick and Slaughter in Kendal as part of the street programme of MintFest, the annual festival of international street theatre. Further down the street were the Grand Theatre of Lemmings presenting a revival of the late, great Marcel Steiner’s classic Smallest Theatre in the World. Co- artistic director Dave Danzig started his career working with Marcel so there’s a full circle going on here. In its OTT, rough round the edges, boisterous way the Smallest Theatre in the World is the fore-runner of all these one person/small audience shows that are so fashionable these days. But unlike those shows a larger audience gets to join in with the experience.

Later in the evening Belgian duo Compagnie DeFo took the concept of provocation one step further. DeFo are an object theatre company and their performance featured two bewigged aristocrats who had stepped straight out of Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract. They had a banquet table on wheels on which a sumptuous meal had been placed. The meal was mainly meat but also featured a range of dolls that looked as though they had only just managed to escape from the bizarre experiments of Dr. Moreau. You could see further mutant toys in little windows all around the base of the table.

The two aristocrats then proceeded to show how such decadence ends in corruption and debasement. They fell on the meat like hungry dogs, a case of cocaine was emptied onto the table and sniffed, the woman performer ground her backside against the groin of a man in the audience, further dolls were assembled from the legs and arms found amongst the meat, and eventually all this excess turned to shame.

Definitely not a family show (the programme warned as much) but what was fascinating was that the audience both young and old took it in their stride. What made it work so well was that the two performers were so good at standing their ground in such close proximity to the people watching.

For a complete contrast you could walk up the hill and take in Theater Tuig’s contemplative music machine show Breekbaar in the grounds of Kendal castle, a perfect setting for a show that requires you to listen hard. Tuig’s work is process led – you see the nuts and bolts of a theatrical effect being assembled in front of you. Breekbaar features a large music machine covered in flowerpots and drums. Inside this outer structure is a giant spool of rope. As one of the performers pulls the rope it causes another large interior cylinder to rotate. This cylinder is covered in small spikes which trigger beaters in the same way that those small musical wind-up toys function.

Tuig are always a fascinating company to watch and their shows generally finish with a satisfying theatrical pay-off. Breekbaar looked like it still had some way to go in that department.

MintFest is taking a year off next year and apparently the Arts Council wants it to present a new ‘vision’ for what the festival can be. The response to that can only be, why? Innovation rests in the work and a festival needs to be adaptable to the needs of that work so that the audience gets to see it in the best conditions possible. Last weekend there were street theatre shows, installations with sound, a specially commissioned promenade performance around town, circus, large-scale shows, fire sculptures, and dance – virtually every form of outdoor work you could imagine. If it’s not broke don’t fix it never seemed more true.