Abstract
Masks and puppets are a hallmark of productions by Footsbarn Travelling Theatre. Imagined and created by Fredericka Hayter, a founding member, they play an integral role in the design and dramatic action. This article considers the presence of puppets in productions of Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest. Drawing on photograph archives and conversations with Fredericka Hayter, it examines crossovers in Footsbarn's use of masks and puppets as well as interactions between puppets and live performers. It suggests that the puppets’ evanescent lives in performance are informed by the company's nomadic history and guided by pragmatic and aesthetic considerations in the service of text and audience.
Since the company's inception in Cornwall in the 1970s, when they revived Cornish legends in street shows, masks, and puppets have held pride of place in the aesthetics of Footsbarn Travelling Theatre. Their diversity owes much to several decades of globe-trotting and their prevalence reflects Footsbarn's approach to theatre as a form of live arts that favours the collective over the individual and the exploration of multiple verbal and non-verbal forms of expression. That is why some spectators attending the York Shakespeare Festival in May 2024, where they saw Footsbarn's latest Shakespeare production, Twelfth Night, directed by Sadie Jemmett, said they missed the masks and puppets. Certainly, there were none of the puppets in various sizes, shapes, and materials that have peopled – alongside masked and unmasked human performers – previous Footsbarn productions of plays such as Perchance to Dream, The Tempest, or Romeo and Juliet, as well as their non-Shakespearean repertoire. Nonetheless, a nod to this tradition featured in the production, in the shape of a fool's bauble, or marotte, whose face, encircled with a red jester's cap and bells and controlled by a rod, reflected the features of Brenden Amonett, who played Feste. At times a limp object, this marotte took on an increasing presence, ranging from moments of complicity when it seemed to imitate Feste's saucy character to others when it played front role, to the extent of peeping through curtains in the centuries-old trick associated with fools 1 and seemingly speaking, ventriloquised by Feste who remained hidden. The effects were in turn comic and poignant, with this small but very much present avatar of Feste acting as a reminder of the vulnerability of the jester's status. It also paid tribute to the way Footsbarn's use of masks and puppets has been instrumental to their vision of the Shakespeare plays they have produced over five decades.
Like all the costumes for this production, the bauble was designed and made by Fredericka Hayter. One of Footsbarn's founding members with her husband Paddy Hayter, Fredericka is the golden-fingered creator of all such artefacts ever since their beginnings. In 1981 the whole company left the barn that was its base in Cornwall (loaned by co-founder Oliver Foot, hence the company's name) and crossed the Channel in a convoy of caravans and trucks, with a double-decker bus serving as schoolroom, eventually striking camp at La Chaussée, a farmhouse in Auvergne on the outskirts of the delightfully named village of Hérisson, from which they have travelled around southern France and the rest of the world. Throughout, La Chaussée has remained the company's home base, where its members live, work, and produce the shows which they then take on tour. 2 That is where I saw Twelfth Night when it premiered in their marquee on a cold evening in April 2024 before touring to Britain, Romania, and Italy, where I met and spent time with Fredericka. I was fortunate to visit her amazing workshop, see some of her ‘historic’ puppets and gather her thoughts on the company's and her own work. This forms the basis of this article, which, written from the perspective of a Shakespearean, not of an expert in the art of puppetry, draws on reviews and photograph archives, as well as the work of theorists of puppet theatre such as Steve Tillis and Claudia Orenstein. 3 The focus is on the puppets in Footsbarn adaptations of Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest. I hope to show how their evanescent yet resurgent lives in performance are informed by the company's origins, its nomadic history and an ongoing process of bricolage and recycling that is guided by pragmatic, cultural, and aesthetic considerations in the service of the text, with the aim of reaching out to a wide diversity of audiences. Although I shall focus on the use of puppets, it is at times difficult to separate them from the company's use of masks since they are created by the same person, thereby animated by a similar creative drive and sharing similar performative aims with respect to theatrical illusion even while holding different functions.
Masks and/or puppets: defying categories
The company has drawn performers from different countries, cultures, and linguistic areas, with wide-ranging skills including music, dance, and circus arts. The troupe is composed of (mostly) humans and artefacts – puppets, but also a wide variety of masks behind which the human actors ‘disappear’. Footsbarn's approach to theatre associates humans and puppets, who play alongside and with each other, the puppets extending, doubling, and interacting with their operators and the actors – who may also double as puppeteers. Performances play continually with the sense of ‘seeing double’ that Shakespeare already theorised as the essence of theatre: ‘Methinks I see these things with parted eye, / When everything seems double’ (A Midsummer Night's Dream, 4.1.196–7). 4 This illusion is remultiplied with the use of puppets, if one follows Steve Tillis's theorising of ‘double vision’ in the realm of puppetry, which provides a guiding thread in this article: ‘The process might be called “double vision”, for, in the course of the performance, the audience “sees” the puppet, through perception and through imagination, as an “object” and as a “life”, in two ways at a time’. 5 Tillis argues that ‘what is wilful in the live theatre is “native” to the puppet: a “make-believe” existence predicated on a double vision that acknowledges the object of the puppet to have “life”’. 6
Footsbarn puppets come in all sizes and shapes: finger or glove puppets; marottes like Feste's; doll- or child-sized rod puppets; giant effigies. These may range from corpulent figures one and a half times the size (and twice the girth) of a (human) adult (as in Christmas Cracker, 2009–10) to elongated figures two or three times the height of an adult. They are manipulated in various ways: some are costume puppets, with the manipulator inside the structure who, strapped inside a framework, controls the head and arms and remains hidden to the audience. 7 Others are controlled externally by visible puppeteers using long rods to move heads and hands. Masks and puppets are sometimes difficult to dissociate, challenging categories. Some of Fredericka's more complex figures combine the two roles or lead successive lives as a mask then a puppet. Fredericka's art, like Shakespeare's craftsmanship, offers the spectator a palette of shifting, competing, complementary moods and tones, ranging from unsettling carnivalesque to emotional resonance.
Working from one of the many masques larvaires she makes, in the tradition of Jacques Lecoq, or some other mask, Fredericka may choose to use it as an oversized papier-mâché head for, say, Gertrude, then recycle it as the head of a large puppet. 8 Conversely, a puppet's head may become a mask then, once again, the head of another puppet at some later stage. The result may, for the audience, be a disorienting blurring of distinctions, when actors and human-sized or slightly larger puppets ‘wear’ similar masques larvaires.
One striking example of the creative overlap between masks and puppets is a figure in Christmas, This Fair Child (or Christmas Cracker, 2010), an old woman holding a basket on her back, with a large baby in it, head and shoulders visible. One instinctively assumes that the carrier is the performer and the baby the puppet. In fact, it is the other way round. The actor is the baby, wearing a mask. Unseen to the audience, he is leaning back with the basket carrier strapped over his front, which he handles with his arms that are visible to the public as being those of the old woman or, alternately, at other moments, those of the baby. Being a puppet manipulator with Footsbarn can thus also entail having contortionist skills.
‘Masks take the ego out of a person’, Fredericka says, as does the foregrounding of puppets, whether the puppeteer is working unseen, in the background or focusing the spectators’ attention on them.
A history of bricolage
Footsbarn's involvement with puppets may be traced to multiple formative factors: affinities with other companies; a nomadic ethos, exposing its travelling players to a wide range of cultures; welcoming for varying lengths of time performers who bring a variety of skills (acting, singing, music, circus arts) and cultural or linguistic diversity. All this serves their engagement with Shakespeare's text in a practice-based approach where multiple languages of performance are activated in response to the challenge of starting from Shakespeare's text and reaching out to non-Anglophone audiences. The company initially started out as a mumming company which typically offers street performances where large, emblematic figures parade, hence Footsbarn's receptivity to the work of companies such as the Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont, which they discovered through Oliver Foot. Bread and Puppet's expertise in the world of puppets started with rod and glove puppets and developed into larger and larger puppets which have occupied centre place in pageants. 9 Touring and spending long, immersive periods in Africa and India exposed Footsbarn to ritual and other cultural uses of masks and puppets, to skills and materials often sourced in nature, such as reeds, straw, and hemp. Fredericka remembers how ‘we absorbed ideas wherever we went, without trying to copy them’, soaking up and transposing rather than reproducing what they discovered. 10 Nearer home, another source of inspiration has been the Catalan company Els Comediants, whose style builds on the region's ancestral tradition of capgrossos, big-heads, and gegants, giant figures, some of which are mobile statues carried by volunteers in street festivities, while others, of a slightly reduced format, are puppets, carried and manipulated internally. 11 All this has fostered a vision of theatre which renews links with street spectacles, for popular audiences which might not go to the theatre. One memorable production of Footsbarn was a promenade performance of Romeo and Juliet in the sophisticated heart of Paris. When Footsbarn do not perform outdoors, they perform in theatres, but they also have a tradition of playing in a marquee, ideally their own, in keeping with their nomadic way of life: this attracts non-theatre-going audiences in a space associated with the circus, which they reproduce when performing out of doors by using a low, circular stage.
Either way, the aim is to create what Comediants call a ‘theatre of the senses’, in which masks and puppets play an essential role, in coherence with an approach which Paddy describes as ‘practicing our artisanal art of a popular theater’: 12 in the world of Footsbarn, popular theatre combines multiple arts and crafts.
The ‘company's aesthetic’ has been described by Lyn Gardner as make-and-do; a magpie approach using found materials and alighting on anything its members admired in the work of theatre-makers from Grotowski to Brook. Its pick-and-mix bag of styles appealed to new audiences.
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Hybridity is also apparent in the interplay of different languages of performance. The art of puppetry developed by Footsbarn is anchored in a deep respect of the text, a coherent vision of Shakespeare's dramatic art and a constant attention to ways of engaging with the audience, or rather the multiple audiences, for which the company performs. The inspiration for the masks and puppets, the decision to use them in a Shakespeare production, comes from the text itself, Fredericka insists, originating in the word ‘shapes’, which Shakespeare uses repeatedly in The Tempest and which is taken up in stage directions:
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P ‘Enter several strange shapes’(3.3.25SD) A Such shapes, such gesture and such sound, expressing – Although they want the use of a tongue) – a kind Of excellent dumb discourse(3.3.45–9) ‘Then, to soft music, enter the shapes again’(3.3.102SD)
The early modern fascination with shapes, in imaginations and folklore, was also fuelled by travellers’ accounts of encounters with strange figures such as blemmies, bellies with heads. They invited a fascination similar to the sight of big-heads in Catalonia today, which contrast the size of the mask's head and what appear as the disproportionately small feet and hands of the person wearing it, rather as, Fredericka notes, in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Bringing together figures of contrasted sizes and proportions in a street performance or on stage contributes to awaken the audience's senses, playing on wonder and strangeness; and indeed, the uncanny is inherent to puppetry, ‘when the thing acquires a life’. 16 This diversity is further informed by a vision of Shakespeare's world that is indebted to the work of scholars like Kenneth Muir on folklore and festivity, C. L. Barber's Shakespeare's Festive Comedy or François Laroque's Shakespeare's Festive World. Fredericka sums up Footsbarn's view of Shakespeare's world as follows: ‘Shakespeare writes about the cosmos, nature, the pagan world, all levels of society’. One might add the transformative power of language and action, a lability also tapped in classical authors like Ovid, which enables early modern dramatists to people the stage and spectators’ imaginations with ‘translated’ (A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1.1.195, 3.1.120–1, 3.2.34) or metamorphosing characters and situations. Masks and puppets are not hampered by language barriers, they are ‘an international appeal to the senses’ (Fredericka) and visually contribute to the illusion of transformation. Puppets also open new dimensions, inviting an understanding through the senses and emotions, especially when they ‘perform’ alongside live actors, creating multiple levels of fiction.
Puppets in Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest
Romeo and Juliet
Perchance to Dream (2002–2004) offered a medley of Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, and King Lear. This production used bunraku puppets for Romeo and Juliet, who were dressed like the two performers, male and female, who manipulated them. The puppets’ faces were crafted to resemble those of the actors – a recurring feature of Fredericka's art. These young puppets were the size of large dolls, handheld, with the head controlled by a rod. Juliet had long hair, minute hand-carved hands and a long Elizabethan dress, Romeo wore an Elizabethan costume, with hand-carved hands and feet. At one moment in the production, the two actors/operators placed the puppets on a bed for the wedding night scene with gentle solemnity; standing at either side of the bed, their gaze directed the audience's attention to the puppets and that intense dramatic moment which precedes the parting of the lovers who will only meet again in death. What Claudia Orenstein describes as ‘the set-ups of the actors to the objects, fulfilling practical needs’ 17 drew attention here to the storytelling frame and theme of this production, ‘Perchance to dream’, with a mise en abyme: spectators were watching a show drawing on emblematic scenes from a selection of plays in which actors were playing their own roles and in turn, as directors/puppeteers, staging one of their play's most emblematic moments, focusing, through their gaze and gestures, the spectator's attention and emotions.
The scene was then screened behind a white sheet, with the two puppet figures silhouetted, facing one another, in shadow theatre. This evocative moment using puppets replicated an earlier production of Romeo and Juliet in which the lovers were performed by young actors, children of company members. For the wedding night scene, the silhouetted figures of the young performers came together behind a candle-lit curtain, their figures dominated by the ominous shadow of Tybalt, ‘an ever-present reminder of the fate of their two houses’. 18 In yet another variation of Romeo and Juliet (Hérisson, 1993), stylised, cut-out figures similarly doubled for the live actors behind a white sheet, creating a shadow theatre effect for the dance at the Capulets’ house and the wedding night scene. While this use of puppets for the love scenes imbues those moments with a poetic innocence that preserves the young actors, puppets were also used to dramatic effect for other characters, with a rapid switch from performers to puppets, as during the fight between Mercutio and Tybalt, described by Angela Maguin: ‘No weapons are used in the ensuing fray which, when it dies down, reveals two bodies – puppets – in the middle of the stage’, with ghostly, masked figures standing round as bystanders. 19 Puppets and masked figures are here brought together at a moment when the trajectory of the play takes a tragic turn.
A puppet featured at yet another moment of Romeo and Juliet, in the 1992 promenade performance in Paris, that was set in the garden and colonnade of the Palais-Royal, which houses the Culture Ministry, a short distance from the Comédie-Française; masked figures led spectators through the garden and the façade served for the balcony scene, in – literally – a spectacular encounter between a prestigious site of French culture and street arts.
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The Tempest
Fredericka told me that the Romeo and Juliet puppets used in Perchance to Dream later served as Ferdinand and Miranda in the 2012 production of The Tempest, in keeping with a sense of recycling that is both pragmatic and artistic, inherent to the life of travelling companies of actors and puppeteers alike. It also enables a fluid approach and draws attention to Shakespeare's own mythopoetic universe, which stages couples of young lovers who seem to reach out to each other across the plays, holding up a double, or indeed remultiplied, vision to spectators seeing, for instance, Romeo and Juliet then The Tempest. This is also explored, of course, through the use of twins in The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night.
The Tempest holds a special place in Footsbarn's repertoire. First created in 1978, then again in 2004, the play was revisited in 2012 during a three-month residency at Guimaraes (Portugal), where it became Indian Tempest, travelling to India in January–March 2013 and performing in nine cities across the sub-continent under marquee, or in closed or open-air theatres. It was revived at Shakespeare's Globe in London in August 2013. 21 Many in the cast were Indian.
In all the productions, bunraku puppets, whether handheld, doll-sized, or oversized, were used, with variations between Footsbarn's different versions of the play. A skeleton puppet gave visual intensity to the words of Ariel's song: ‘Full fathom five thy father lies, / Of his bones are coral made’ (1.2.474–5).
In Indian Tempest, Prospero (Reghoothaman Damodaran Pillai in the Globe production) remembers the past (1. 2), with Miranda (Rosanna ‘Zana’ Goodall, also in the Globe production) sitting at her father's feet and listening to his revelations about their childhood; he tells her the story of their exile from Milan as if reading her a tale from the large book before him. 22 Onstage besides Miranda are puppet versions of the father and the daughter, bunraku puppets she operates. This tableau combines the massive, commanding figure of Prospero, draped in robes, with his book before him on a lectern, young Miranda crouching before him, handling the puppets as if she were playing with dolls. Actors and puppets all face the audience. Interaction is produced only by speech and Miranda's focused handling of the puppets, which embody Prospero's narrative. As if animated by the text, they turn their heads and bodies, with puppet Miranda cradled in her father's arms; as the story progresses, they move from the small chair on which they are sitting to take their place in a small boat, which is in fact a mere ribbed structure, emphasising its frailty and the dangers of the sea voyage. When the boat, which also contains a loaf of bread, sausage, and wine, moves away slowly on the end of a string pulled by a member of the company, Miranda moves out of her role as puppeteer back into her role as a character and stands, clasping her head in dismay, while Prospero, who has mostly focused on his book until then, looks down, gazing after their departure in silence. 23 Orenstein draws attention to the shifts in puppeteers’ – and, one might add here, actors’, unless one chooses to see Prospero as a ‘puppeteer’ too – engagement with the puppets: ‘A puppeteer can shift how they look at their puppet, the quality and energy they express, to suddenly become a character now interacting with the object they are performing rather than a supposedly invisible figure, primarily present to animate the object’. 24 The shift from puppeteer to actor, the complex interactions between puppeteer and puppets in this scene, as in the wedding-night scene from Romeo and Juliet, crystallise in the ease with which Goodall moves seamlessly from being a character to becoming a puppeteer then resuming her role in the play, thereby drawing attention to the scene's double timeline, the ‘before’ of the narrative and the ‘now’ of the dramatic action. After crouching alongside the puppets and directing her and the audience's attention to them in this poignant moment of story-telling, she jumps up, back into the present of the dramatic action, reverting to the embodiment of a young girl about to fall in love in the here and now of the play.
Miranda's onstage response to the puppets, their reduced proportions, identical features and clothes with the actors, their still features and silence, all draw attention to the vulnerability of exile. Sitting, then standing, between her father's narrative and the puppets’ enactment of the past, Miranda represents the future which needs this moment of revelation to become possible. The audience watches Prospero and Miranda watching the puppets of their past selves as he tells his story: the puppets enact his speech, widen out the understanding to a larger audience, breaking through linguistic barriers and appealing to different levels of cognition and emotion: seeing, hearing, remembering. The puppeteer, Miranda, is visible and centrally present, if mostly silent in this scene, and ‘her’ puppet is an extension of her own self, here again creating a sense of double vision and inviting a multilevel response from the audience. Her visible handling of the puppets encourages the audience to ponder who is manipulating whom, and the different arts called into play: Prospero ‘manipulates’ Miranda, through the strings of his rhetoric, while she manipulates the puppets. The complex emotional connections this creates between father, daughter, and puppets flow outwards to the audience.
Similarly reflexive, playing on ‘One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons!’ (Twelfth Night 5.1.226), Ariel carried a handheld rod puppet of herself, with, typically, shared features. This, and the physical proximity between Ariel and her puppet, which she could be seen holding before her, facing the audience, against her chest, intensified the effect of what Orenstein describes as ‘doppelgängers onstage, a human and a crafted figure visually echoing each other’.
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This drew the audience's attention to Ariel's status, unstable identity, and uncertain fate: to what extent is this shape-shifting ‘spirit’ a creation of Prospero's, manipulated at will? If thou more murmur'st I will rend an oak And peg thee in his knotty entrails till Thou hast howled away twelve winters. Thou shalt be as free As mountain winds, but then exactly do All points of my command.(1.2.349–51, 1.2.609–11)
The puppets of Prospero and Miranda invite a tightly focused, downward gaze of the other characters on stage as well as the audience. Ariel held her puppet at the level of her face or chest, performing, as it were, behind it. The puppet of the fertility goddess, standing high above the human performers during the betrothal scene (4.1), engaged the gaze and the emotions of those onstage and in the audience differently: such figures ‘oblige us to look upwards, they elevate our gaze’, to borrow the words the French historian Patrick Boucheron uses of tall statues. 27 The difference, of course, is that, unlike a statue, this figure is fluid and animated, always remaining above the fray, as behoves a goddess, yet conveying through movement, the flow of arms and curve of head a protective, enveloping role. This giant puppet is an elongated figure swathed in silky fabric in marine tones of blue and green, with a hieratic head suggestive of Picasso-like African masks and carved hands on the ends of long flowing sleeves. The figure seems to watch over the company and the audience, occasionally positioned when unused at the entrance of the marquee like some kind of tutelary god of the threshold, guarding the liminal space between reality and illusion. 28 This rod puppet is operated by several visible, unobtrusive puppeteers, one for the head, two for the arms, clad in garments of similar tones. Unlike Miranda with the doll-sized puppets, they work in the background of the goddess figure, who combines the roles in the wedding masque of Iris, the gods’ ‘many-colored messenger’ (4.1.84), Juno, goddess of marriage, and, centrally, Ceres, fertility goddess, summoned to bless Ferdinand and Miranda, and shelter them from ‘scarcity and want’ (129).
The visible operating of puppets serves to literalise Prospero's role throughout the play, from his orchestration of the mock storm which brings his erstwhile foes onto the island to his final release of the spirits and dispelling of magic. Breaking his staff, or rod, he steps down from his role as master puppeteer, perhaps because he has learnt the limits of his arts: ‘the role of the puppet-operator’, Tillis writes, ‘is to learn the movement potential of the puppet, and to allow for that potential to be realized’. 29 Levels of wonder ripple through the language of The Tempest and are played out on stage through the sleight-of-hand tricks of a ‘spirit’, Ariel, and a masque of goddesses. In Footsbarn's productions of Indian Tempest, with its doll-sized versions of Prospero and Miranda, and a tall goddess effigy, ‘the puppet's double-vision allows it metaphorical power that extends in both directions from humanity’. 30
‘La marionnette et les autres arts’
Drawing on their experience as a nomadic company, reaching out to countless audiences around the world, whether villagers in central France, multicultural communities in York, or spectators in India's widely differing cities, on their talent for absorbing and weaving together ideas, and on their practice of recycling and recrafting props, Footsbarn provides a living experience of creativity as movement. This endows their productions with features that are both recognisable and renewed, so that audiences may experience the twofold experience of comforting familiarity and estranging surprise. Footsbarn's approach to puppet theatre may be summed up as ‘La marionnette et les autres arts’, to borrow the subtitle of the French journal Puck, created in 1988 by the Institut international de la marionnette, Margareta Niculescu and Brunella Eruli. Skills developed in the making and handling of puppets are conducive to onstage interactions between the puppets and their operators, between the puppets and the other actors, that enhance the spectating experience.
Puppets occupy different roles: characters in their own right; doubles of the onstage actors; and substitutes for young actors, as in Romeo and Juliet where the actors playing the two lovers yield the stage to their puppet stand-ins for the bedchamber scene and the final death scene. Just as one often feels that Shakespeare, like other contemporary dramatists, reworks his stories and characters, creating a world of fluidity, the creativity of Footsbarn and their use of masks and puppets reflect a similar, organic approach to theatre. The interaction of performers and puppets, in symbiosis when the former operates the latter, visually unfolds the multiple layers of fiction and poetry in Shakespeare's drama, whether in terms of intra- or extratextual echoes or through the juxtaposition of multiple timeframes. The ‘double vision’ of puppets as objects and characters is not only metonymic of the illusion at the heart of theatre, it holds mirrors up to the characters and their proleptic selves, before they appear on stage, as in The Tempest, while in Perchance to Dream the actors dressed as Romeo and Juliet and handling their puppets become survivors of their own fate, summoned back in a rewriting of the playtext to tell the tale of love and death performed by their avatars.
‘Putting life into objects, whether masks or puppets, giving them your power of life’, impacts drama, Fredericka says. Her words recall those of the French director Antoine Vitez: ‘Puppets readily lend themselves to great myths. They have extraordinary epic power, mythological energy’. 31 The visually operated mask of the fertility goddess in The Tempest reconnects with the self-aware artistry of masques on the early modern English stage and, beyond that, the bounteousness associated with Ceres in Ovid's Metamorphoses and other classical texts. The doll-sized puppet lovers recall Ben Jonson's adaptation of the myth of Hero and Leander in Bartholomew Fair, a London-based comedy. As in the 1614 edition of Jonson's play where the puppets of Hero and Leander are listed alongside the other characters at the beginning of the play, Footsbarn puppets, large and small, would deserve to feature, alongside their human fellow performers, in ‘The Persons of the Play’.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.