Stephen Mottram & his 'Seed Carriers' - a Workshop & Play

International Puppet Festival, Lambert Puppet Theatre, Sept '99.

The joy of theatre at Fringe-festival time is not simply the opportunity to see work of a quality and variety that is not generally on-hand in Dublin, but the opportunity to engage in the discourse and debate that this variety and quantity of work engenders. In the context of a festival, there is room for more distinctive and original approaches to the art of performance; crucially, for performers to take more risks. Even if these risks won?t come off in every production, each and every production adds to this debate, constantly focussing on the core questions of ?what is theatre?? and ?what is the role of theatre in society??. It was in this context that I ventured out to Monkstown last month to sample the wares of the International Puppet Festival hosted by the Lambert Puppet Theatre. In particular I wanted to witness the work of Stephen Mottram, an English puppeteer with a quite distinctive take on puppetry, and a very definite stance on the previous two questions.

Photo of Stephen Mottram & puppet 'The Seed Carriers', a performance work by Mottram, features in one scene a happily-walking-along puppet being summarily picked-up by a 'giant' human hand, swung against the wall head-first and discarded limp on a pile of other limp wooden creatures. Stephen Mottram, creator of these 'little crunchy people?, the Seed Carriers, illuminates this scene by pointing out that one of the advantages of working with puppets is that you can create a character and then do things with and to it that you can?t do with a character in a human play.

The violence in ?The Seed Carriers? is not that of Punch and Judy, or even of The Simpsons? ?Itchy and Scratchy?, say, with characters merely beating the living daylights out of each other. Rather, we see metaphors for the violence and cruelty of fate, of nature; intriguing, vulnerable little organisms are suddenly plucked from their routine lives by a giant oppressor, and subjected to imprisonment, slave labour and torturous deaths, all in the service of the oppressor?s race or species? survival. Survival of the fittest then; or, perhaps, survival of the most cruel. ?The Seed Carriers? is a provocative, dark meditation on evolution, fate, determinism and the human condition, conceived and staged with remarkable vision and imagination, featuring a cast of some forty incredibly complex hand-crafted puppets, each of which Mottram built himself in his workshop.

Mottram?s observation about puppetry is seemingly an elementary one; yet, it indicates his own unique perspective on puppetry. He appears primarily a dramatist or theatrical storyteller, one who happens to work with puppets, applying to them an integrity and discipline more commonly associated with the physical theatre schools and companies of Europe. In fact, Mottram concedes not being very interested in puppets per se but rather in the potential of puppets to impact emotionally upon an audience.

His philosophy of puppetry boils down to an intriguing maxim for a puppeteer: don?t believe in your puppet. In fact, it?s not even a puppet. It?s just a collection of materials on the end of you arm, or of a string, or whatever, to be animated with mechanics, not with emotion. Let the audience believe in it ? if it is right, it is inevitable that they will,
for it is natural to project personality onto something that gives the illusion of free movement. If the puppeteer believes in his creation, however, his faith will only get in the way of technique, and it is this technique that is crucial to the successful animation of the puppet.

The workshop focuses in on one crucial element of technique: counter-balance: the requirement that animals shift their weight dramatically from one side to another to give balance when moving. Move your puppet to indicate this counter-balancing effect and the puppet will look heavy; make it look heavy, and it is immediately, instinctively more
credible as a living thing.

Try it at home. We did: clutching rather indeterminate pieces of cloth with knots in them (it?s better to experiment with a puppet that doesn?t immediately inspire affection ? this, after all, is the point Mottram is making) we feverishly practiced counter-balancing our would-be puppets in front of mirrors on the workshop floor. The mechanics were difficult, adjusting to the mirror perspective and working in teams (two limbs or a head each); but when we got the mechanics right, the effect was sublime. Formless cloths of contorted limbs suddenly came alive, and we found ourselves proudly watching little handkerchief men and women stumble towards their reflections. Of course, as soon as we identified with our little figure, we got distracted with thoughts of its personality and, as inevitable as lazy traditional puppetry, we lost concentration, lost our technique and with it, all illusion of life. But the wonder of that moment of creation remains, and with it, the conviction of Mottram?s talent and insight.

Stephen Mottram?s technique, technical expertise and inventiveness are mind-boggling. Crucially, the ?little crunchy people? that populate the world of ?The Seed Carriers? are also heart-achingly real; one might say they were beautifully drawn. No matter how much Mottram antagonised his fellow puppeteers in the workshop with deliberately cold talk of puppets, there is no fear of coldness from this production: sad, elegiac, frightening, dark and, ultimately, revealing just the necessary glimmer of optimism for the human condition to leave one smiling as well as reflecting. ?The Seed Carriers? is a masterpiece, a poem in wood and music for the stage.

Colin Murphy

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