Puppets - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 30

having him clamping his i st over the face when he sang things he should not have. In the end
this was abandoned, as essentially, as it would have meant losing the use of one of Rigoletto's
great long arms and expressive hands. Using both his hands would communicate more. Also,
the practical detail of making sure the crutch stayed in i rm contact with the l oor would
have been unnecessarily time consuming. So a nice idea, but that went because of simple
practicalities. We shot a pilot using the folly stick, but it did not feature in the i lm.
In Achilles , folly sticks transmuted into masks on sticks that the chorus hold, reminding Achilles
of his situation. The chorus itself is an artii cial distancing device. It's becoming all about using
something artii cial, to say something far more directly.
My favourite character from the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, Jack Point, is a jester who usually
has a folly stick. In my i lm of Gilbert and Sullivan - The Very Models , I tried to have Sullivan
playing Point, saying something sincere to Gilbert through the distance and security of the
folly stick, but again it got complicated, mainly because I did not want to lose the use of
Sullivan's hands. Out went the idea, but I have always been fascinated by a folly stick. It is a
puppet after all. I designed a poster for my school's production of The Yeomen of the Guard ,
and made an unsubtle parallel between the prongs of a halberd and the prongs of Point's
folly stick. Not great art, but I do like giving objects an emotional weight. A folly stick can send
audiences running, as jesters, in general, can be so unfunny, but this notion of putting the
truth into the mouth of an inanimate object (or through the 'mask' of a heavily made-up jester,
as in the opera Il Pagliacci ), is essentially what we do. Having that distance from reality gives
animators enormous licence. It's this distance from the truth that can bring us closer to the
truth. Disembodied graphic heads appearing out of the darkness, prodding both Gilbert and
Sullivan's conscience, act as a sort of folly stick.
Along with Rigoletto and Jack Point, the great Shakespearean fools such as Feste, Touchstone and
Lear's Fool are characters telling the audience and the characters exactly what is going on. Lear's
Fool, particularly, in a play so full of lies and blindness, straightforwardly tells Lear the truth. King
Lear is a play that uses all manner of distancing devices to give the characters a perspective to
see the truth when the truth is hard to discern. Here characters are blinded, so that they can see.
Others embrace madness to become sane, and the Fool, often clutching his folly stick, is among
the wisest. It is this distancing that we can exploit so much with puppets in stop motion.
Fools have their folly sticks, but so often clowns need some small token to hide behind: a red
nose, huge l at shoes, an odd hat, white faces, a tear drop, baggy trousers and the like, all allow
them the licence to get away with plain speaking.
Drag
Another example of how something so fake can be so truthful are two brilliant actors, Patrick
Fyf e and George Logan (it would cheapen their craft to call them drag queens),
who for nearly thirty years had audiences in hysterics with their creations, Dr
Evadne Hinge and Dame Hilda Brackett, two genteel ladies of an uncertain age
who sang and reminisced about the golden days of Noel Coward, Ivor Novello,
and Gilbert and Sullivan. Their beautifully researched characterisation was on
the surface all innocent and af ectionate, but underneath lay barbed satire about
theatre, those in it and their sexualities, full of joyously smutty jokes. Two dear