That, and so much more, changed with The Sound of Music. The puppets in the Lonely Goatherd sequence have had a profound infl uence on me. Even today, it is a beautifully executed and dazzlingly performed sequence. The actual performance by the puppets is rather economic, with most of the energy created through the editing. Aged ten, to me the naughty nuns seemed fun, Julie Andrews was luminous, the scenery breathtaking, and Eleanor Parker and Christopher Plummer … well the fi lm is too full of so many gloriously guilty pleasures, but I just need to hear that opening music to Lonely Goatherd and I have watch the whole sequence with complete and utter attention and respect. I suspected that Julie Andrews and the kids were probably fronting for the real hidden puppeteers and that the sequence was not fi lmed in real time. The manipulators gave the characters much life, especially with the eyes, but it wasn’t just the gorgeous design, the exhilarating song or the choreography that had me entranced.
I knew that something else was going on, although I couldn’t quite articulate what. I knew that this puppet show wasn’t there as a charming diversion to keep the kids, on screen and off ,
happy. I was aware that the puppets were echoing the main triangular relationship of the fi lm, and this struck me as most agreeable. I noticed how the relationship between the lovers and the mother was refl ected in the goat puppets, through use of colour (especially that ravishing purple), and with eye movements of the ‘mother’ character. This was the moment that semiology planted a seed in my head. I began to realise that other elements could tell the story, not just the more obvious and literal plot. It was these echoes and parallels that fascinated
One of the world-saving Tracy family puppets from Gerry Anderson’s
Thunderbirds (Richard Haynes).
me. Chatting about mise-en-scène probably made me an odd ten years old, but this puppet sequence was a eureka moment. The continuous musical through-line makes you unaware that fi lming has compressed real time. This fi lm was so groundbreaking in its use of editing. The Do-Ray-Me sequence jumps locations and time in the same musical phrase, but the fl owing movement and choreography drive the action through without jarring any logic.
Although the fi lming of the puppet sequence most likely took a good couple of weeks and Dame Julie probably wanted to strangle the kids with the puppets’ wires by the end, it feels absolutely spontaneous. This was no doubt achieved by the most unsponatenous of planning, rehearsal and strict continuity. When the numbers is fi nished, you feel the same high that the characters do. That was another appealing element: not that these kids use the puppet show as an emotional release, making an unspoken point with their father, but it was a group coming together to produce something, however small, with everyone contributing, that also struck me. What’s more, the ‘performers’ are having such fun. If that’s what puppets can do, count me in. This short sequence, with its backstage story, the onstage story and the story out front, manages to sum up succinctly the state the characters’ relationships at that point in the fi lm. To have done so with characters literally chatting away revealing their inner thoughts would have been very uninteresting.
Most marionettes, though, pale next to the sophistication and content of Ronnie Burkett’s Theatre of Marionettes, which supply the depth and detail of performance I have missed in other marionettes. Single handedly, and performing the voices live (the multiple voices alone would defeat most performers) he operates up to thirty diff erent puppets in a single two-hour show. He is deliberately in view the whole time, as are the other waiting puppets, and Ronnie’s own physicality is as much part of the performance as his puppets. Watching him in action, the relationship
between the puppets and the puppeteer is so strong that he seldom needs look directly at the puppets beneath him. The puppets often have fi xed faces and hands, expressing so much through their whole bodies, using stillness just as expressively. They interact in ways that belie the spaghetti of strings, and at a recent performance of 10 Days on Earth, the small detail of a puppet stepping out of a pair of slippers drew a gasp from the audience. These puppets walk, making solid contacts with the fl oor. The plays are complex, rich and utterly moving, taking the art to its most sophisticated and most direct level, with the puppeteer inseparable from the puppets. When I met Ronnie we were both rather humbled about the other’s work, each thinking we were lower down the puppet pecking order, but what Ronnie does in one evening has taken me my whole career, and I’ve hardly begun to tackle his range of emotions. He was also transformed by the Lonely Goatherd sequence, and swapped stories with Julie Andrews after one of his performances. There is something about puppets that keeps linking people. With Ronnie’s performances, there is no hiding, and the audience shares the event. I’ve not yet found a way for stop motion to break out of its glass wall and communicate directly to the audience.
I’m trying.
Ronnie is so right about the roles that puppets allow us to play. No ordinary actor’s repertoire can match our wide range of characters, and the necessary rethinking of approaches to a part tests and excites us. Ronnie’s shows work by seeing the strings and the performer. The distance of created artifi ce in a supposedly realistic situation is such a brilliant device, as Shakespeare knew from Hamlet’s Mousetrap.
This is when animation works so well: when it glories in its artifi ce, its fi lmic language, its theatricality, it is able to say so much more. Since the goatherds I have been a sucker for plays within plays and fi lms and pieces that simple revel in their medium. The idea that something as artifi cial as an innocent- looking puppet can say something more honestly than a human character is my main preoccupation. Look at Gromit, who is hardly a realistic dog, but you recognise real character, real thoughts and real emotions. All the extra distracting details have been stripped away, and you know exactly what Gromit is thinking. Of course, it helps that he is so beautifully animated.
There has been a tentative revival of marionettes on the big screen. Parker and Stone’s Team America, with the Chiodo Brothers’ gloriously dynamic puppetry, was laden with so much irony, but still managed to get detailed performances out of the puppets, and hysterical and aff ectionate