Moving Puppets

When Sydney Theatre Company asked playwright Hillary Bell to come up with an idea for an education show her pitch was, well, not exactly perfectly suited to a younger education crowd. The Splinter, which tells the story of parents (portrayed by Helen Thomson and Erik Thomson) reunited with their daughter, Laura, nine months after her abduction (inspired by Henry James' novel, The Turn Of The Screw, and the Hans Christian Andersen tale, The Snow Queen), did make an impact on STC's Literary Manager Polly Rowe though, and she soon assembled a team that would bring it to life, with Director Sarah Goodes and Puppetry and Movement Director Alice Osborne at the helm.

Osborne came to puppetry during her studies for a Theatre Media course at Bathurst, drawing heavily on her previous training in dance, and has recently been seen maneuvering puppets with the likes of My Darling Patricia, the creative team responsible for last year's STC hit, Africa. “The thing about dance and puppetry is it's a great crossover because basically, the way I feel about it is, if you can understand your own movement and the way your own body works, then it is much easier to transfer it to another object.

“I worked with Phillippe Genty, in France, and he always said that dancers make good manipulators, something about space awareness or things moving through space,” Osborne recalls time working alongside the French master of movement and image in theatre, almost wistfully. “If we're not working with a 'human' object, even working just with material, the way that the audience sees it is by putting human qualities into it, so by understanding your own physicality it's a short cut to working out how something else might behave, a sort of physical mechanics.”

This physical mechanics is crucial to the visually rich world that holds together Bell's emotional thriller. “Hillary has written in really exquisite imagery through the whole piece and so part of our job is not to just illustrate that imagery visually – you know, like a children's book that has the writing and then the illustrations describes what the writing is saying, but we don't want to just double up like that – we want to create imagery which really drives the piece forward rather than just echoing what the text is saying.

“Basically, what Sarah and I have talked about a lot and our main investigation with the puppetry is the fluid representation of Laura. There are questions of identity - the child goes missing and the child gets returned - and we start to wonder if it's the real child. So we're interested in if we're wondering about whether it's really her, and how she's changed, in shifting the image of her. It's not just one puppet child that is the whole way through, we're testing literal versions and much more abstracted versions of her as well.

“It's fascinating. We're investigating it and experimenting with it at the same time so it's not as straightforward as just interpreting a script; the visual parts have to be dramaturgically investigated as well.”