Amber Botteley on Autumn Portraits

Eric Bass’ wonderfully crafted puppets take on unique human personas and lives of their own as you steadily fall in love with each and every one of them… yes, yes, even the annoyingly loveable meh, meh Music Man! Five beautiful tales told through an exquisite understanding of movement and storytelling bring each and every world to life capturing the audiences hearts, and perhaps gradually bring our beloved puppet master to life in our eyes as he so lovingly does to his muses.

 

It was wonderful to appreciate the care and love that has been laboured into this routine (from crafting the puppets to mastering the intricacies of this production) and to see the backstage preparations which can so often and easily be forgotten. To have everything which was to be used for the piece to be in front of your eyes, yet it needed our beloved puppet master to bring it to life. And bring it to life he did.

Each of the ‘vignettes’ has its own puppet master, or at least the puppet is its own puppet master controlled by our puppet master… if you see what I mean…

A Medieval King has a trick played upon him by his Giant Jester, unable to defeat it, he sighs in acceptance as his Jester proves his superiority by effortlessly releasing his majesty from the clutches of the trick.

We move to our meh, Music Man, with a tale of two lovers which is ‘very sad and he insists he didn’t write it’ while he performs to his puppet masters – us.

Next to our Spirit Lady, herself a mistress of stories as she becomes her puppet master (puppet mistress…?), she tells us of a sad tale of a disbelieving and suspicious husband trying to protect his family to tragic ends.

With intrigue we are confronted with a Monk, trying to summon a spirit, only for him to command it from himself. This ‘spirit’ becomes his puppeteer with tragic consequences – there seems to be a theme emerging…?

We come to a very sleepy Shoemaker who is awoken by what he assumes to be the Angel of Death. He tries to convince the Angel to let him finish “ze boots for little Rachael” while tugging on the audience’s heart strings and being one of the most adorable yet tragic characters.

And back we are once more to our Music Man who becomes our orchestra conductor (and a puppeteer of his new found, very surprised musical volunteers).

The puppet master, perhaps becomes a puppet? Do we, the audience become the puppets? Or are we the puppeteers? Whatever way round this may be, you will go home pulling at your strings for more.

This uniquely crafted piece has a few clumsy moments – and perhaps putting the fear of god into your audience whilst scanning for musically gifted (or not as the case may be) volunteers isn’t necessarily the ideal – but taking charge of all those puppets on your own cannot be an easy task! Especially when that pesky Music Man must be causing havoc with the others…