Perils of Puppetry in Islington
The great conductor Thomas Beecham said you should try everything once — except incest and folk dancing.
This injunction was evoked years later by the dance critic Clement Crisp who warned against the twin perils of puppets and mime, though I think he only really had the late Marcel Marceau in mind.
How quaintly those words now ring in the wake of so much theatre in the past twenty years. But the echo returned at the end of last week when I visited Lyndie Wright, mother of film director Joe, in her workshop at the Little Angel Theatre in Islington.
Lyndie, with her late husband John, founded the Little Angel in a derelict temperance hall opposite the King’s Head off Upper Street in 1961. It’s still a magic place, and recently boosted by the gorgeous collaboration with the RSC on Venus and Adonis.
But has the dedicated art of puppetry been eclipsed by its assimilation into modern radical work by groups such as Theatre Rites or Kazzum, whose former artistic director Peter Glanville is now the Little Angel’s boss?
Not at all, thinks Lyndie, and nor do I, really. The current show, Jelly Bean Jack, is a good example of how a traditional story, Jack and the Beanstalk, relocated to a Tex Mex setting with little table puppets, a giant Elvis and a thrilling King Kong finale — little Jack becomes Fay Wray and is rescued by a flying chicken! — can temper traditional skills with a new slant.
Sure, this show doesn’t have the exquisite beauty of some of the marionettes that Lyndie works on non-stop in her atmospherically cluttered workshop, but the peculiar power of inanimate creatures energised by our participation remains the fundamental quality.
I’ve been going to the Little Angel, on and off, for many years. Without a child to take, my attendance on those charming wooden pews is less frequent than I would like.
You tend to go to theatre for children only with children, which is a bit of shame. Recently I bumped into the old box office manageress at the Polka Theatre in Wimbledon. “We haven’t seen you for some time,” she complained,”and how is little Thomas now?”
Little Thomas, I informed her, was six foot tall, well into his late twenties and making documentary films for television.
When he was three I took him to Sooty shows at the May Fair. The following few years were our golden period at the Polka, the Little Angel, the Unicorn and the rest. Then came Starlight Express, which every body-popping eight-year-old Michael Jackson fan of the mid 1980s absolutely adored. And then Thomas and his friends started going to nightclubs, basically.
Coincidentally, Thomas did join me in North London on Friday night to see a show, but not at the Little Angel. We met up in Dalston to relish a Turkish kebab and take in the Arcola’s fine new production of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People.
I should develop a side line as a theatre tour guide. I walked from the Little Angel in the late afternoon sunshine all the way to the Arcola, along the Essex Road and up the Ball’s Pond Road and down into darkest Dalston.
It’s a fascinating journey, not least for the gradual encroachment of the culture shock involved in travelling just a couple of miles. For all its virtues, the Little Angel is a little genteel. And for all its faults, the Arcola most certainly is not.
