The Puppet Grinder Cabaret is an irregular event for an adults-only audience, showcasing an eclectic mix of live puppetry and animation. I caught up with the latest installment at the Little Angel Theatre, and was treated to one of the most unusual, edgy and entertaining nights I’ve spent at the theatre in ages.
Our compère for the evening is Baby Warhol: a deadpan, belligerent and unclothed baby dolly and self-proclaimed guru, floating inside a gilt frame. He’s supported by Chris Cresswel, gaunt, weird and creepy, demonstrating an unwholesome ability to terrorise the audience into collective interpretive dance.
Kate Brehm’s virtual toy theatre presents a hand-drawn episode from Alice in Wonderland, all the more magical because we can see exactly how she’s doing it. The Woman with No Mouth, Chloe Roach’s fabric-based animation, offers a daring and ever-so-slightly appalling exploration of an obsession with violent self-fashioning. And Robert Bidder’s Jumper Eggs (eggshells hand painted in the manner of significant items of knitwear) provides a beautiful, whimsical, offbeat interlude.
Florian, a cut-out animation from Andrew Gibbs and Zosienka, is a sepia-toned fairy tale about the fatal meeting of two lovers on a bridge, with a meticulous eye for environmental detail and infused by a strain of mordant wit. It’s like something a Pre-Raphaelite painter might have hit upon in a moment of unaccustomed giddiness – an absolute atmospheric delight.
Then Clementine the Living Fashion Doll (managed by Mark Mander) stars in her own battily glamorous addition to the Indiana Jones franchise. And Spank the Dancing Monkey (ably assisted by Iestyn Evans and Andy Heath) gives a moving, manic account of the vicissitudes of being a monkey minus an organ grinder.
If you haven’t been to the Little Angel, then get it sorted. Seriously. It’s one of the few theatres in London where I can’t remember ever being disappointed by a show. And Puppet Grinder Cabaret demonstrates why this might be so: a marvellous melange of fantastical stories, outrageous characters and unabashed eccentricity, imagined and orchestrated by some scarily talented folk. As Baby Warhol so rightly snarls: “This is art”. And I’m not going to argue with the guru.
I disagree. We watched the show last night with high expectations. While the short films shown were ok, many of them were animations and not puppets. A friend of the producer even asked her at the interval when we were going to see puppets – “you’ll see more in the second half”…. turned out much the same as the second half, I felt like I’d been watching a school performance. There are much more advanced and varied forms of puppetry around and none that make an adult only claim purely for the use of the word F*ck a couple of times.