French festival pulls the strings

by Patrick Jackson BBC News Online

The art of puppet theatre is celebrated at a dedicated festival in the French town of Charleville-Mezieres, where puppeteers from around the world gather to entertain.

In a vast, darkened church, a pair of white tapering hands worthy of Michelangelo perform a parable of love above a black screen as an audience sits spellbound.

The snake out-hissed the kids in this production - Carte Blanche theatre, Geneva

From beyond the walls comes the thump of drum and bass guitar where crowds mingle in the streets with towering monsters whose absurdist papier mache heads bob on unseen poles and wires.

This is Charleville-Mezieres, a sleepy town in the French Ardennes which once every three years comes awake to host a world festival of puppet theatre.

"It's the Mecca of the puppet world - every puppetmaster has to come here at least once in their lifetime," as Argentina's Diego Stirman puts it.

Stirman's act, an electrifying one-man mix of sophisticated hand puppetry and buffoonery, is only one of the 50 or so official performances on each of the festival's 10 days.

Then there is the work of the 70 or so fringe companies and the scores of listed street theatres which seem to mushroom by the day as sunburnt performers turn up on the cobblestones, trundling behind them mysterious battered chests which rapidly metamorphose into stages no bigger then a few square yards.

And no account of the festival would be complete without a mention of the town itself where the elegant 17th Century streets and squares become festooned with every kind of marionnette, whether suspended above cafe tables or displayed in shop windows.

In the aftermath of the great French performing arts strike which killed the Avignon theatre festival among others this summer, Charleville more than compensates in variety and scope.

Bob Cratchet as you may never have imagined him - scene from Taptoe's Skoetsj

Theatre for all

Puppet theatre is a serious art in Charleville with the artistes producing their own satirical daily newspaper, the Karagoz, as an alternative to the organisers' promotional materials, lashing dud shows no matter how big the venue or the poster but equally plucking talent from the obscurity of the fringe.

Among the virtuoso productions this festival was Skoetsj - that's Scrooge to anyone familiar with Dickens' A Christmas Carol - by Belgium's Taptoe Theatre.

The work ingeniously combined a live actor with stringed puppets, shadow play and projection, in a rare mix of delicious hilarity and haunting pathos.

Germany's Marc Schnittger was of an altogether drier humour in his HANDwork, scenes from everyday city life depicted by simple glove puppets.

Many associate puppet shows with kids, of course, and Charleville resounds with the shrieks and whoops of children whether they are being worked in the streets by the single puppetmaster with his trolley of tricks or in a hall by a company such as Benin's Ditout.

Only a working glove could do for a builder - scene from Marc Schnittger's HANDwork

The line between stage and audience quickly vanished as excited toddlers interacted with the exotic beasts prancing with uncanny vitality on the strings of Ditout's strolling players as they performed Man and the Animals.

For manipulation, however, few could rival the skill of Burma's Mandalay Marionnettes company, its beautifully ornamented figures dancing out traditional Buddhist tales with hardly a tangled string.

New life for an old art

Three years seems a long time to wait between festivals, but Charleville does not close its doors on the "little people" in between, being home to a permanent International Institute of Puppetry.

But for the theatres, as composer John Lewandowski of Swiss company Carte Blanche explained to me, the festival provides the best venue in the world for producers and bookers, as well as being a valuable opportunity to meet up with other practitioners of what in many countries is an endangered art form.

At times you cannot tell the puppeteers from the puppets - Compagnie d'ailleurs, France

Tiny young companies like Intermezzo from Marseilles, which evokes an ocean voyage with the barest of means in its powerful Novecento, get rare international exposure.

One Italian priest, Father Marco Campedelli, is probably just as contented, however, to have new audiences for his religious parables.

I happened to come upon his puppet theatre in the central church quite by chance as it had not been publicised in any of the festival literature but his work - which he already performs in Verona whilst attending to his duties as a parish priest - easily rivalled any of the one-man shows on the programme.

It was just one of many gems at a very special festival for the theatre world's "little" - but no less fascinating - brother.