Muffin the Mule would not have been out of place at BAC this weekend where the British Festival of Visual Theatre kicked off with a series of performances to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Puppet Centre.
Muffin, of course, is supposed to represent the old-style, puppets-are-only-for-kids type of attitude that the Puppet Centre has spent the last couple of decades trying to change. So it is a pity that so much of the work on offer was merely Muffin in a new guise.
Watching the inappropriately named Raw, a decidedly safe show created by Sue Buckmaster and a group of puppeteers including the estimable Steve Tiplady and Sean Myatt, made me wonder whether the challenge facing the new puppetry has everything to do with content and very little to do with form.
After all, over the last few years, we have come to recognise that you can fashion a puppet from almost anything: just think of the fabulous junkyard puppets of Doo Cott and the instant newspaper creations of Improbable. So the balloon puppets of Raw should present no particular problem for an audience, even if they do rather resemble the efforts of a challenged magician at the end of an overlong children's party.
But the real problem here is that having created believable puppet life, the show's creators mistake narrative for meaningfulness. There is no doubting the skill of the manipulation, but what begins by looking like the Benny Hill tit 'n' bum school of puppetry (there are only so many uses for a sausage balloon), ends up unbearably cute.
The act of creation is at the heart of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein which in the hands of Green Ginger becomes Frank Einstein, a gothic spoof featuring wonderfully expressive life-size latex puppets. The company play on the show within the show idea as life and art, nightmare and reality, the doorbell and the tolling bell become confused as leopard-skin clad author Shelley Evans attempts to pen her own version of the horror story.
Green Ginger do not always sustain the comic tone, but there are some lovely visual touches - a grassy graveyard at night; some fantastic Heath Robinson-ish machines that bang and flash. It is good fun, but no more.
Fun is not a word that you'd use about DNA's Skin Deep Circus, a circus tent performance for 20 at a time that re-creates the Victorian freak show without ever questioning the cultural or social significance of the phenomenon. I'm not sure DNA has ever heard of disability rights.
The audience become voyeurs, invited to admire the antics of the tap dancing human fleas, the rubber lady or to feel up the Fiji mermaid. There is a kind of jokiness about it, but no sense of irony and absolutely no critique. I kept wondering why viewing this kind of thing with miniature puppets was deemed to be perfectly acceptable entertainment whereas the real thing would quite clearly cause outrage. It also made me consider whether there might not be a killing to be had from puppet porn.
Shows like Stephen Mottram's brilliant and terrifying gene drama The Seed Carriers, which was also part of the weekend and has been reviewed favourably on these pages in the past or Ronnie Burkett's totalitarian parable Tinka's New Dress prove that puppets can be profound. So it's triply disappointing that this weekend of celebration of the best of British puppetry should be so banal.
