Georgia Series: Beso Kupreishvili’s Fingers Theatre

I left A Midsummer Night’s Dream just in time to catch a truly unique show by Beso Kupreishvili’s Fingers Theatre. The company used a well-known Rock music video (the name and title of which I cannot divulge due to copyright implications) as the inspiration for the finger puppet show.

All characters in the piece are played by finger puppets clad in the most basic of costumes and cunningly lit to create the right level of focus and intimacy. The company uses three different types of puppets. The first is a sort of show presenter/emcee, a bag-shaped creature with a moveable mouth. This character would certainly please a younger audience, but to me it delivered little more than mild amusement. The second type of puppet was more engaging. Its head was of a similar design to characters from the Muppet Show and its body was created by a human hand: the index and middle fingers served as legs while the thumb and the ring finger formed its arms. The third type also used the puppeteer’s hand to create the shape of the body but added a small and simple egg-shaped wooden head that possessed a nose but no eyes. This proved to be the most touching of all the puppets.

There’s something amazing about watching a hand transform into a fully-fledged (albeit silent) character, all the more vulnerable for the visibility of the puppeteer’s naked skin. The gestures delivered by these finger puppets was of a simplicity and precision that is often lacking in human actors; and it brought home some of Kleist’s ideas in his famous essay On the Marionette Theatre. Dancing to the music, two finger puppets come together and separate, experience close physical encounters, and are finally given wings (created by another actor’s wide-spread hands) to fly away together.

The Fingers Theatre’s performance is full of the kind of rhythmic precision that was so clearly lacking in Tsuladze’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that I began watching earlier on in the evening. Overall, the performance was a bit too long for my taste, but that is more the original video’s fault than a failure on the part of the company. After my initial disappointment with performances in Georgia, Fingers Theatre certainly improved my hopes for the days ahead!

The Fingers Theatre production took place on the 22/11/08 at the Kote Marjanishvili State Drama Theatre Tbilisi (small stage).

To watch a video clip of the Fingers Theatre’s adaptation of Bizet’s opera Carmen visit this link.