Notes on UK Puppetry History

Like a Christmas break extended across three thousand years, it has been a strange triple millennia for puppetry. Sometimes castigated as immoral - one puppet plays stars a puritan berating the performers for transsexuality -  or relegated to a children's sideshow (thanks, Jim Henson), they have also carried the satirical burden of theatre, as in Spitting Image and were the only theatre not banned by Cromwell during the Interregnum. Churches used them to illustrate Bible tales in the medieval period, when bishops weren't moaning about their lack of artistry. And while their popularity has been on the wane during the past century - like all live performance, except for trite musicals and the empty bombast of stadium rock, they've been hit by the small and big screens - they are still celebrated for their political and playful potential.

Going back into classical times, the sketchy evidence suggests that they were sufficiently respected to allow one puppeteer, Potheinos, to set up on the site of the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens, and the mythical hero-inventor Daedalus is credited with a moving statue of Aphrodite. Like so many other ancient Greek traditions, however, the marionette disappeared with the collapse of the Roman Empire, emerging only in fragments through the Catholic Church's patronage.

It's not until the 1700s that British puppetry gathers serious attention: the fashionable ladies of Bath would compete for public attention through sponsoring shows, and the language of political and moral satire is filled with references to the puppet as both metaphor and literal performance. Martin Powell's company became the hottest ticket in town, taking up residency in Covent Garden and the character of Punch, now a curiosity, became a popular presence in stories as diverse as Noah's Ark and the siege of Troy.

Yet two hundred years later, and puppetry has been relegated to the music hall - if becoming part of the most vibrant British tradition can be seen as a relegation. Although it is a commonplace to see puppetry's twentieth century as a decline - the first half spent in vaudeville, the second in working men's clubs, until it was "rescued" by experimental theatre makers in the 1960s - it's worth remembering that ballet, which somehow emerged as a British signifier of taste and high art, originally presented itself to the UK through the music hall. When damning Potheinos with faint praise, the historian Athenaeus contrasts the marionette show against the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides which had previously been performed at the Theatre of Dionysus: now, the stage that set the charges for the explosion of dance through appearances by Anna Pavlova was shared by the puppet masters.

Scott Cutler Shershow's Puppets and Popular Culture discusses how the puppet has been used as a signifier of a debased art - the modern assumption that puppetry is for children is merely a further iteration of this prejudice - yet it remains vibrant and adaptable. Perhaps television has undermined the audience for an old school Punch and Judy, but puppetry evolved into animation, effectively becoming part of the medium that supposedly replaced it.