Puppets - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 38

The B IL Baird puppets from The Sound of Music (Richard Haynes).
between the puppets and the puppeteer is so strong that he seldom needs look directly at
the puppets beneath him. The puppets often have i xed faces and hands, expressing so much
through their whole bodies, using stillness just as expressively. They interact in ways that belie
the spaghetti of strings, and at a recent performance of 10 Days on Earth , the small detail of a
puppet stepping out of a pair of slippers drew a gasp from the audience. These puppets walk,
making solid contacts with the l oor. The plays are complex, rich and utterly moving, taking
the art to its most sophisticated and most direct level, with the puppeteer inseparable from
the puppets. When I met Ronnie we were both rather humbled about the other's work, each
thinking we were lower down the puppet pecking order, but what Ronnie does in one evening
has taken me my whole career, and I've hardly begun to tackle his range of emotions. He was
also transformed by the Lonely Goatherd sequence, and swapped stories with Julie Andrews
after one of his performances. There is something about puppets that keeps linking people. With
Ronnie's performances, there is no hiding, and the audience shares the event. I've not yet found
a way for stop motion to break out of its glass wall and communicate directly to the audience.
I'm trying.
Ronnie is so right about the roles that puppets allow us to play. No ordinary actor's
repertoire can match our wide range of characters, and the necessary rethinking
of approaches to a part tests and excites us. Ronnie's shows work by seeing the
strings and the performer. The distance of created artii ce in a supposedly realistic
situation is such a brilliant device, as Shakespeare knew from Hamlet's Mousetrap .