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In case you're still interested...


Here's The Scotsman Review (came out in print a while back but I didn't catch it - not available online, I don't really know why) -

“Puppetry is important,” intones the puppeteering artist undertaking a masterclass before us, with a perhaps overly weighty sense of gravitas, “but I don’t want anyone to die.” He’s just informed us that anyone who has a fear of puppets – for such a thing exists – may take their chance to leave the room now. Only those who are fully committed to the serious business of puppetry must remain.

Alongside him stand a male and a female apprentice, Stina and Wolfgang (Fiona Clift and Tom Espiner), both from Eastern Europe and clad all in black, including balaclavas.

A pin-sharp satire on the sometimes impenetrably self-regarding business of the stage, Henry is named after Henry Chessel, the master puppeteer’s late but very famous director father, who makes recurring appearances as a humanoid assemblage of black bags which represent our host’s “sadness, depression and fear of death”.

In the hands of performer Mark Down and his company Blind Summit, previously acclaimed for productions including The Table, the puppeteer is a wonderful dark comic creation, a hypnotically relaxed guru coasting on earnest spiritual voyaging and barely contained self-regard, which his eager onstage acolytes clearly lap up. His show, he tells us with cultish pomposity, is “a confrontation between my art and your imaginations – if you don’t engage, then nothing really happens at all”.

David Pollock, 3 STARS


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