“Town Mouse and Country Mouse” is on the road! I set out to produce a show which is simple to set up, and gives the impression of simplicity to the audience, but which draws them into a puppet world which holds them for 45 minutes. Audiences numbers are up to 180, so the show had to work visually and audibly for the children sitting at the back. The journey towards the illusion of simplicity is far from simple though, and ideas,themes,puppets and props have been ruthlessly cut and edited to distill ambitious concepts into a workable form. (N.B: No mice were harmed in this cut-throat process) T ..read more

I got the idea from being in the audience for “Slavka’s Snow Show” where a huge auditorium is covered in paper snow. I wondered if I could recreate this in miniature and so now at the beginning of the Winter sequence of “Piggery Jokery”  snow falls, and if my aim is good, it covers Su who is playing music next to the puppet theatre. She gets laugh from a perfectly timed raised eyebrow. The effect is produced by using an aerosol can of water-based stage snow, and it melts away after a minute or two. photo: Tony Jones I bought several cans of the stuff, because I keep leaving the ..read more

Or….Memories of Norwich Puppet Theatre. Some extraordinary things appear as if from nowhere, and then after a while they become normal, and then taken for granted, their origins ignored and unknown. Such is the case of Norwich Puppet Theatre, one of a very very few dedicated spaces in the UK, and as rare as hens’ teeth. Hand to Mouth Theatre (Martin and Su) has a long connection with the place and the people involved in it, stretching right back to its beginnings 40 years ago. Fresh out of Art College, we rented a winter let on the Norfolk Broads, with the intention of helping establish a new ..read more

Funny business, this funny business! The question of bums on seats, artistic integrity, and nostalgia are all mixed up for us at the moment! Just recently we performed our “Goldilocks” show to full houses at the Nuffield Theatre, Southampton, and at Watermans in South London on consecutive days, and as far as we could tell, everyone left feeling happy, having had an uplifting experience. We also left the theatres feeling happy and uplifted, though for the additional reasons that this show was more or less the same one we devised in 1983, being our first attempt at a non-Punch and Judy piece fo ..read more

                                                                           Darwin and the Origin of the Species of Puppets. Darwin waiting for puppets to evolve into something less frivolous. Life is movement, and movement is life as far as the subconscious is concerned. Evolutionary psychology has a plausible theory that when we were evolving, it was in our interests of survival to treat any unknown move ..read more

My on/off  Punch button is currently set to ON as we approach the annual Covent Garden shenanigans where there are predicted to be around 40 Punch and Judy theatres performing in a madcap  celebration of silliness.  Following hard on the heels of the seriousness of the election, it will be a well-received affirmation of the triumph of anarchistic nonsense I’m sure! Putting to one side the show itself, a subject which has filled many a thesis, I was thinking about the peripheral stuff which Su and I have been involved with over the years, which I think have added a ..read more

  Performances abroad are the cherry on our theatre cake. We never plan where to go – the invitations come randomly and unexpectedly. For our Romanian adventure in October, our third foreign festival this year, we were recommended to the organiser by Nik and Sarah from Noisy Oyster who had performed there last year. Based in the northern city of Iasi (pronounced Yash) towards the Ukraine border, it was a visual/physical theatre festival and a fairly prestigious one too – companies from 15 countries were performing. We were only able to see three of these due to scheduling, but as always t ..read more

In response to the often asked question “How do you put a show together?”, here’s a breakdown of “Flights of Fancy” which is currently touring festivals this summer. We’re fairly practical in our approach-we make a checklist of the artistic elements we’d like to include, along with a checklist of the practical considerations of how to actually do it. It’s a question of balancing daydreamy ideas against the nuts and bolts. Fear of failure is a constant factor which we try to hold at bay by reassuring ourselves that we’ve done it before so we can therefore do it again. But within that thought l ..read more

A busman’s holiday for puppeteers? A video diary of Martin’s 60th birthday celebrations aboard the magnificent mechanical elephant in Nantes ..read more

It’s 24 years since Jim Henson died at the early age of 53, and I’ve just been reading his biography by Brian Jay Jones. There is much to enjoy and wonder at in this book, but I guess the principle elements that stand out for me are his extraordinary drive and sense of purpose, coupled with optimism about himself and his work. Apart from the staggering amount of work he did, it was the quality of the work which was always the key factor.  Coming from an American culture it’s no surprise that in order to achieve his personal vision and mode of self-expression he needed to finance those dr ..read more