Everything you need to know about London's only festival of puppetry.
Where: Various venues across London
When: 28 October - 6 November 2011
How much: Prices vary, most shows will be £7-15
Making a return to the city after its award-winnin
debut in 2009, the SUSPENSE London Puppetry Festival brings together a varied programme of puppetry from across the UK and beyond. Co-ordinated by Little Angel Theatre, the home of puppetry in the capital, the festival involves a total of 11 different venues and 30 companies in this ten day cultural celebration.
For everyone who thinks that puppets are for children, SUSPENSE is setting out to turn that assumption on its head. Consisting solely of work created for adults, the many pieces being shown across London over the ten days push the boundaries of what puppetry can address, with subject matter ranging from death to cultural identity. There is also an international breadth to the work presented, which features productions from Iran, France and the USA among others.
Suspense brings together a wide collection of venues, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, Wilton's Music Hall and New Diorama Theatre. who will host a series of workshops, talks, cabaret performances and even opera.
As the likes of War Horse propel puppetry right to the forefront of British theatre, SUSPENSE is a timely response to this surge of interest in the art form and will be an unmissable event for the puppetry afficianados and novices alike.
To find out more about the shows and events taking place and all the venues getting involved, visit the festival's website.
Some reviews from Suspense Festival 2011:
Life Still at Pleasance Theatre
In this strange but oddly absorbing offering, the abstract and ceaselessly inventive stylings of Folded Feather transport the audience to an unspecified apocalyptic wasteland, an atmosphere of devastation that is potently evoked by Matt Short’s bewitching and unsettling soundscape. But something in the debris is moving ... This is not puppetry in the traditional sense. Crafted puppets are ousted in favour of a series of ordinary objects behaving in extraordinary ways. Supremely talented performers Oliver Smart and Matt Short imbue object after object with persuasive life and vitality, from shoes to blankets, they become at times almost disturbingly human-like. The piece is driven by a fiercely Darwinian violence but infused with infectiously playful humour. In one of the show’s most charming sequences, two birds devised from pillows bicker and peck at one another in hilariously observed competition, the most subtle of movements from the puppeteers lending these objects vivid character. With little to connect these vignettes and no speech aside from a scrambled opening voiceover, the piece sometimes struggles to hold together and the imagery is left wide open to interpretation. Despite this lack of guidance, however, the attention rarely wanders. The apocalypse has never been so ingenious – or quite so much fun.
Plucked, Little Angel Theatre
Using a series of carefully manipulated puppets, three performers guide us through a strange tale that plucks at both mythical themes and timeless human concerns. Crude projected animation and live drawing proves surprisingly evocative, as does Jim Bond’s rather rickety set. In the place of dialogue, meanwhile, Pat Allen’s gorgeous music becomes storyteller, reflecting every twist and nuance in the tale. The scarcity of speech does occasionally threaten to make the action sluggish, and when words do intrude in the form of a voiceover at the end of the first act this feels a little like an incongruous interruption. There is in fact an inherent incongruity between the two halves of this piece, as the opening act traces the often touchingly intimate relationship between two characters before we are thrust headlong into fairytale territory after the interval. The overall charm of this creation, however, begs forgiveness for its flaws. By turns disturbingly bizarre, wickedly funny, touching, grotesque, enchanting and deliciously gothic, this is wonderfully grown-up fairytale fare.
Reviews by Catherine Love
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