How did you get started in puppetry?
I started very young, I was six years old when I made my first puppet, it was a dinosaur made from a cardboard egg box and a woolen sleeve from an old knitted sweater. This really ignited my passion for making and performing puppet shows, which my amazingly supportive family were constantly subjected to. Throughout my school years I had incredibly encouraging teachers in both art and drama who helped me integrate the use of puppetry into my course work. When it came to choosing what to study at university I was immediately drawn to the BA degree in puppetry at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (now sadly discontinued), and ended up being the only person in my year on the course! While studying I learnt the fundamentals of collaboration within a creative process, as well as taking responsibility for all aspects of puppetry: from creating a concept all the way through to performance as a puppeteer.
Toby Olié, Co-Director and Puppetry Designer.
Courtesy Children's Theatre Company
Are there experiences that have helped shape your career in puppetry?
My first professional job after studying at university would define not only the fist six years of my career, but audience’s perspectives of puppetry on a global scale. In 2006 I was auditioned for the development workshops of a new show centering around a horse in the First World War that was being planned at London’s National Theatre. To fit a very long story into this answer, I was cast as one of the three puppeteers of Joey the horse in the original production of War Horse in 2007, and was a puppeteer in the show throughout its 2008 revival and the eventual West End Transfer in 2009. The show won a host of awards and changed expectations worldwide of what puppetry was capable of. Since War Horse I have been very fortunate to continue forging a career in puppetry, and more recently I have started directing and designing projects of my own
Many puppeteers gravitate towards a particular style or form in their work, is there one that you've particularly resonated with?
I think I have always resonated towards a declared style of storytelling, both in the use of puppets with visible puppeteers, and an aesthetic that doesn’t disguise the mechanics or structure of a puppet to emulate ‘reality’. By leaving imaginative space for the audience to complete the image of the puppet or interpret a visual style that is more poetic than prescriptive, you give them a opportunity to invest their own ideas and thoughts. Becoming fully engaged in, and transported by, the performance.
As one of the big debates in puppetry is where to put the performers, to keep them visible or try to hide them, could you talk about the choices and direction you took things for this show?
The first draft of The Enormous Crocodile script and the songs existed when I was first brought on board to decipher a puppetry language for the piece in 2020. After reading it I was immediately struck by how multi-faceted these animal characters were, and that the tone, rhythm and wit of the text wasn’t aiming to speak to an audience of only children. So in an attempt to make a piece that would engage the adults in the audience as much as the children, my immediate instinct was to find a language that celebrated how the story was being told as well as telling the story itself.
This resulted in designs that integrated the actor’s bodies into their main animal characters, without hiding them or limiting their physical expressions. Allowing the actor and puppet to exist in parallel and inform each other’s performances.The sense of play and storytelling in how the characters are portrayed allows us to not only integrate other styles of puppetry into the show but also means we can have fun with our crocodile performer breaking the show’s conventions (and reassembling their own puppet) when he employs his secret plans and clever tricks to disguise himself.
Photos courtesy Children's Theatre Company
Were there any particular design challenges you faced with what you wanted the puppets in this show to do?
The main challenge was how to represent these animal characters, some of them incredibly large,when we knew that a cast of five actors meant each animal could only have one puppeteer to animate it. In the end it was a combination of two factors that led to me to determine each puppets design. Determining the personality of the characters and combining that with each different animal species’ physical essence gave me a perspective on how the performer might move and what parts of their puppet would be directly animated and which would have indirect, passive movement. For example, Muggle Wump the monkey is a very playful trickster, so by making the animal’s body from stretchy lycra, the puppet can create silly, extreme poses, and the flexibility means the performer can tumble and jump with cheeky abandon. Whereas Humpy Rumpy the Hippo is the sturdiest of the characters, but also the most nervous, so the solid foam sculpt of his head creates a sense of bulk, but it is contrasted by his very nimble and flexible ears and tongue that can wobble and twitch to suggest his fear.
What did the process for this show look like to adapt Quentin Blake's very expressive drawings into puppets that feel alive for the stage?
There wasn’t any expectation or desire to create puppets that resembled the illustrations from the original book, in fact we were all very keen that our production had it’s own aesthetic. So I think it was about maintaining a sense of proportion and the character’s personalities from the illustrations that people would expect, but combining that with a more vivid colour palette and bold, geometric patterns to give the animals both individuality and theatricality. From my experience adapting works by Disney and Studio Ghibli, as well as Roald Dahl, I’ve learnt that sometimes the way a character appears in an existing form (animated film, illustration etc.) doesn't necessarily lend itself to an expressive physicality when realised in 3D. So interpreting that character into an emotive,sculptural form requires some revisions or abstractions that allow an audience to believe it has come to life on stage. A puppets primary way of communicating is its movement, and I am firm believer of never sacrificing movement for aesthetic.
The Enormous Crocodile is coming to:
Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis, MN
(1 Oct - 23 Nov)
The Kirk Douglas Theatre in Los Angeles, CA
(5 Dec - 4 Jan),
The Lowry, Salford
(Wed 10 Dec - Sun 4 Jan).
