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Now at last we can proceed to something a little more interesting and discuss who is going to appear on this five-foot stage of ours. Mechanically speaking, the larger the puppet the easier it ought to be to manipulate it accurately. Small accidental gestures are less noticeable, and the intentional ones are more susceptible to refinement and elaboration. In practice this is not quite so true. Until great dexterity is acquired by the puppeteer, refinement and elaboration are just as well not attempted.

Moreover, a great deal more is expected by the audience of a large puppet than of a small one. The quality of illusion possessed by the marionette theatre is such that after a few moments, the eye of the spectator is content to refer the apparent diminutiveness of the puppet to its distance rather than to its actual lack of size, and in consequence accepts without complaint a certain blurring of the effects. The most important result is that in the case of dialogue, the eye is not dissatisfied with the absence of mouth movements—no one in the gallery of a theatre has ever seen an actor’s lips move. The use of a large puppet throws away this advantage.

A fifteen-inch puppet will do anything in reason; it can be clearly seen by the audience in quite a large hall, and (an important consideration) it is not so heavy as to tire the puppeteer’s arms at full stretch. And a fifteen-inch puppet on a five-foot stage has the same relative size as a six-foot actor on a twenty-four foot stage, and a twenty-four foot stage was big enough for Shakespeare. Besides, a proscenium arch three feet high (which is mechanically the best height to prevent a seated audience looking up under it) suits a fifteen-inch puppet. He seems in the right setting under it.

So we will work to a basis of a standard height of fifteen inches. That does not prevent us from having big puppets and little puppets, male puppets and female puppets, adult puppets and child puppets—fifteen inches is only an average measure, and all the following remarks only apply to a standard puppet who is just as much an abstraction as the standard man of the economists. When you come to construct a puppet and to test it out in its natural habitat of the footlights, you will find that ordinary human proportions do not quite apply. Any artist’s handbook of anatomy will give you the relative proportions of head to height, of arms to body and so on, but experiment will soon convince you that it is inadvisable to mould your puppets on this Procrustean standard. Definitely, the head must be a little larger than in the human body, the arms a little longer, the legs a very little shorter, the hands a good deal larger. Similarly the body must be a shade plumper—a puppet of a chest measurement proportionate to that of the human body appears on the stage as a little slender. Why this should be I cannot explain, and I am quite content to leave it to the psychologists and the artists; moreover, as it is purely a matter of taste, I shall not quarrel with you if you disagree with me and plump for puppets of quite another set of proportions. It is worth while remembering that the Greeks, with their use of masks and buskins in the drama, apparently were similarly troubled by the distorting effect of the stage upon human proportions.

There is more still in this question of the proportions of puppets. We may as well take it for granted that it is quite impossible for a puppet to appear exactly like a human being. And if he did, he would tend to be dull. Yet we laugh at a child or a monkey because he is like a human adult, not because he is unlike. There is an element of incongruity in hearing a child say something of portentously adult seriousness, or in seeing a chimpanzee pour out tea just like a lady. In the same way there is incongruity in a puppet betraying in his speech the weaknesses to which humanity is liable, or human absurdities in his dress. To my mind (you need not think so if you do not want to) there must be somewhere in the puppet, both in his appearance and in his performance, an element of caricature. There must be a blend of likeness and unlikeness to humanity, and it is upon the quality of this blend, and upon the seasoning with which it is served up, that the nature of your show (which does not necessarily imply its artistic merit) will depend. Goodness and badness, of course, are far more intangible and indefinable qualities.

And now let us dispense with these æsthetics and try and be practical, and debate the eternally interesting question of joints. Skilled professional puppeteers frequently use puppets whose joints are of the universal kind and which can bend in every direction. This calls for a great deal of skill in manipulation, and invites disaster in an unpractised hand. There is only tragedy in the sight of a puppet bending his arm backwards at the elbow until his forearm is at right angles to his upper arm. The advantages to be derived from a universally jointed puppet are far outweighed by its disadvantages, as far as a beginner (and even an amateur of experience) is concerned.

If a puppet is so jointed that he can only bend as a human can bend, it stands to reason that he can only take up attitudes possible to a human. Do what you will with him, get into any muddle you like, and the figure on the stage is still doing nothing intrinsically impossible. This seems to be in opposition to what I have just written about the necessity for caricature, but the beginner need not worry. The caricature will be there involuntarily until he learns to put it there voluntarily.

So we have to turn our attention to making our puppets with human joints. The ankle, for instance, must be so hinged that the foot can only be extended until it is nearly in a line with the leg and no farther. To explain how to make a joint of this sort would call for pages of description, which would be quite unnecessary to a carpenter and still would not be of any use to a man who was not. I think the photographs which are included in this book are descriptive enough. It is necessary to add that there is no need to make special arrangements in a puppet for those human joint movements which are of small amplitude. For instance, a human can turn his toes out and in, and he can rotate his thigh a trifle at the hip. You will find that as soon as your puppet gets flexible he can do the same, even though he has simple hinges there; the natural wear of the wood will permit it.

The knee is a very important joint indeed. It is absolutely vital that it should bend readily, and yet that it will not allow any reverse bending—that the leg will come up into a straight line with the thigh and no farther. If this is not the case you will find yourself occasionally in terrible difficulties when you walk your puppet or try to make him kneel down—he will kneel like the hind legs of a horse instead of like the front ones. You must give your puppet’s knees a good long hinge and a very definite stop—the length of the hinge being necessary to prevent lateral bending, as otherwise your puppets will tend towards knock knees or bow legs, and may fluctuate from one to the other in a nightmare manner.

The hip joint, as I have said, is a simple hinge as well; the thighs end in tongues which are slipped up into grooves in the pelvis, and a pin is run through the lot. Here a stop is necessary to prevent the thighs from bending back on the pelvis. The pelvis is a compromise, because the human back is possessed of I don’t know how many joints, each of them capable of only a little play. Life is far too short to make puppets in the same way. Joint the thighs on the pelvis, the pelvis on the trunk so that the possible flexion is just about a right angle; joint the trunk to the neck and the neck to the head, and you will find it works quite well and realistically—the clothing conceals how the total of flexion is concentrated at only a few points instead of being distributed over a great number.

The pelvis, then, is that portion of the puppet’s body between his waist and his hip joints, and it is quite separate from his trunk except for the double hinge joint—just like a wasp, in fact. If the top surface of the pelvis is quite flat and applied close to the flat under-surface of the trunk, no movement is possible, despite the hinge (two tongues in grooves and a pin run through, like the hips). But, by carefully paring away the wood from the front edge, bending forward becomes possible, and this paring should be continued, as already said, until it is possible to bend the two nearly to a right angle forwards, while no bending back remains possible.

Very generally puppeteers make their puppets without a solid pelvis, but use instead a section of sock fastened at one end to the trunk and at the other end to the thighs. For the life of me I can find no advantage in this, unless the puppet is destined for a contortionist act. The wobbliness of the legs which results is most unnerving to the puppeteer; and you have only to experience marionette-stage-fright once to appreciate the enormous comfort to be derived from the knowledge that you can sit your puppet down on a chair or on the floor realistically and certainly and without any possibility of error. A puppet with a solid pelvis can be sat down on the stage and kept in a natural position thereafter with hardly any attention—an unrelieved blessing at moments when complex manipulation is necessary, as the puppet-playwright should remember.

The shoulder joint is a difficult one to construct satisfactorily. The method we have decided for in the end is shown in one of the photographs. A screw eye is inserted in the ends of the upper arms. Then the front of the point of the shoulder on each side is cut away, leaving at the back the area corresponding to the shoulder blade. A piece of wire is then threaded through the two screw eyes on the arms, and is laid across the puppet’s chest. The ends are firmly fixed in the puppet’s armpits, and the wire is countersunk over the puppet’s breastbone, after the screw eyes of the arms have been slid along until they are free to move about on the two portions of the wire over the depressed areas where the wood has been cut away. This joint fulfils its purpose in allowing natural movements and preventing unnatural ones, but it is not perfection. It makes clothes a little difficult to fit, and occasionally an arm raised at full stretch above the head does not drop naturally at the end of the gesture—you have to shake the puppet a bit sometimes to get it down.

But it is the best shoulder joint I have been able to invent. Ball-and-socket joints connected by elastic, as in a doll, definitely do not work—at least, not for me. They may for other people, but not for me. If they are tight they stick, and if they are loose they wobble unreliably all over the place, so that the puppet without turning a hair can point straight out behind him—and will, too, if you give him half a chance. He can put his right hand behind his back and scratch his left ear. The pin and loop variety of shoulder joint (seen in a primitive form in lead soldiers with movable arms) will not give all the natural movements and permits some unnatural ones. I cannot help but think that the best shoulder joint is the one I have described—each puppet being experimented with until his particular joints work satisfactorily.

Elbow joints, of course, are simple hinge joints like the knee, of the Dutch-doll type with a stop to prevent back bending, and wrist joints, if you ever find them necessary, are (unless for some special purpose) best made in the same fashion—but wrist joints are on the whole an unnecessary refinement. You may need them if you design your puppet to do some very special trick, but otherwise you can manage perfectly well without them.

A puppet’s neck in general consists of an inch and a half of dowel wood. One end of this is countersunk for half an inch into the puppet’s body, and the joint there consists of two screw eyes, one in the neck and one in the body, hooked through each other. Getting those screw eyes into position is a perfectly maddening operation, but it can be done with care and patience and brute force. Incidentally, as the whole weight of the puppet hangs on these neck joints it is just as well to use the longest screw eyes you can find and see that they are screwed well home. The joint connecting the head to the neck is of the same type, and is similarly countersunk into a groove half an inch deep in the base of the skull, a little behind and in between the two halves of the jaw bone. Countersinking these two joints serves the double purpose both of keeping them out of sight and of restricting the movement they permit.

When you are making these joints you must remember that they differ in action from all the others, in that they have a heavy weight below them and no joints above them. The head must be so connected to the neck that when the puppet is hung up by the head, from the points where the head strings will be inserted, the body hangs from it in a natural standing position. A minute difference in the place in the skull where the screw eye is inserted will make a good deal of difference to the stance of the puppet, and to the mood he is supposed to convey—but fortunately this variation is balanced by the fact that the point of insertion of the head strings can be varied over a pretty considerable area, so that anything save gross errors in the making of the neck joints can be redressed subsequently.

And so we turn aside with relief from these grim anatomical facts to discuss matters that cannot be so casually dismissed. We have talked lightly so far about the head and the skull and the jawbones. But before you take in hand any making of joints it is as well to have your head all ready to receive your body; and—there is no shirking the matter—you have to make your head. It is only by the rarest conjunction of circumstances that you can find in a shop or in the nursery a head which will do. My ballet girls have dolls’ heads, but that is solely because they only have to display the amount of intelligence expected of ballet girls.

No, you must make your head; or else you must do as I did and find someone to make it for you. G. made all mine. Miraculously, he found within himself a quite unsuspected ability to carve and model; and, without in the least trying to belittle his achievements, I have come to suspect that similar abilities lurk undreamed of in lots of people. In that case the sooner they are found and employed, the better.

You must first of all decide what part in your show the puppet is going to play—rope dancer or conjurer or heavy father or what not—and then you take your gouges and your chisels, and your block of wood (beech is a good all-round material for carving, but wood carvers soon develop individual tastes and preferences), and go right at it. If you are wise, you will not say beforehand who it is you are making, as what started out as a clown may be converted by a slip of the chisel into a fairy queen.

Seriously, though, there is another way to go to work besides carving. Hacking a block of wood into the rough shape of a head and face is within anybody’s capacity, and the details can be filled in by modelling with—I must take a deep breath before I write the words for the first time—plastic wood. Plastic wood is the stuff which makes the puppeteer’s life bearable. It has fifty uses in a marionette theatre, and there is no need for me to list them down, because you will discover them all for yourself as soon as you start to make your theatre. When you model with it you must remember that it is a quick-drying stuff, and, naturally, dries on the outside first. If you apply it too thickly a thin skin of solid wood forms over the inner puddingy mass, interfering very seriously with the modelling. It is better to apply the stuff layer by layer, allowing time for each layer to dry off a good deal before applying the next.

You can build up your puppets’ faces with plastic wood quite easily if you will only try, and then a generous use of oil paint will complete the effect. You must always remember that your puppets are not designed to be admired in drawing-rooms, or played with in the nursery. They are meant for the stage, and to be seen in the glare of theatrical lighting. They have got to be tuppence coloured, in other words. Plastic wood and paint between them make much better hair for puppets, as a general rule, than any real hair or tow—moustaches and beards and bobs and shingles can all be made perfectly easily in this way, and incidentally they are far less likely than the real thing to get caught up by a thread and so stand upright, defying all laws of gravity, during a performance. The coils of plastic wood as squeezed direct from the tube will make the coils of a woman’s hair when it is supposed to be long and “up” without any retouching save with paint.

The puppets’ hands can be carved from wood if you like, or you can model them direct out of plastic wood, but in this latter case you will find that a solid central “armature” of wire or match-stick is of great assistance, preventing the hands from drooping in the process of setting. And before making the hands you must have a clear idea in your head as to what the puppet is intended to do on the stage, for the hands are nearly as important as the face as regards acting—as, of course, you realise without my telling you. You have to visualise to yourself what the hands of that puppet would most naturally be doing during his act—they may be spread wide and flat if he is doing some tense balancing act, or doubled into fists if he is a strong man, or held in the ordinary relaxed position if he is just acting.

For, generally speaking, a puppet comes into this world with one special mission in life. He does not play many parts. If our flesh and blood actors had to undergo a surgical operation to fit them for the next part they had to play (I quite agree that a lot of them would be all the better for it, though) they would stick to the same sort of part even more markedly than at present. The same with puppets. Once he is dressed and threaded for one particular part it is better not to interfere with him—if you have got another part you want him to play it is less trouble to make another puppet to play it. I had the idea when I started my theatre that it would be practicable to change a puppet’s clothes during a performance, so that he might be, say, a policeman before the entr’acte and an angel afterwards. But it cannot be done. Most emphatically, it cannot be done. Threading and unthreading a puppet is a long job; dressing and undressing him is another; and both call for a cool head and steady fingers and unlimited time and plenty of light—and you won’t find any of those behind the scenes in a marionette theatre on a first night.

All this, of course, does not preclude the use of the same body in different parts in different programmes. Most puppets only need standard workaday bodies—and, as a matter of fact, it is trouble-saving (though expensive) when you have constructed one good one to get a cabinet-maker to duplicate it a few times—and when you have exploited your first programme to the utmost you can give your puppets new heads and hands, new clothes and new threads, to correspond with their new parts.

I think I have already said that the puppet’s limbs are made of dowel wood. His trunk and pelvis can be made of blocks of ordinary white deal, unless you choose to employ some more durable but slightly more expensive material. You can roughly carve them into shape; any additions which may be necessary (and your female puppets will need them, perhaps, if you want them to have genuine figures) can be made of plastic wood and stuck on, just as calves can be added to the legs. But padding—bits of old material wound round and tightly nailed on—is frequently more convenient. Sleeves and trousers so conceal the shapes of the limbs beneath them, that it is hardly necessary to go to much trouble to shape the limbs. And, of course, if your puppets (your ballet, for instance, or your strong man) wear neither trousers nor skirt it is not necessary to make stockings for them. You paint those on—it is cheaper and more effective, and less trouble.

Incidentally, it is worth remarking that with a bare leg it is not necessary to disguise the hinge knee joint. In the case of Bingo, the Boy Balancer, I went at first to no end of trouble with his knees—covering them with bits of thin rubber sheet and then painting the whole surface. But the human eye is very willing to be deceived. It expects to see a knee if the joint there is functioning just as a knee joint should. After a while I risked putting Bingo on without any camouflage to his knees, because the bits of rubber were a constant nuisance, and I have never (although I have frequently asked about it, tactfully) found anyone in the audience who has noticed his Dutch-doll knees, or who could describe them after the performance with any trace of exactitude. The human knee cap shows a certain amount of movement in action, and the eye of the audience gladly accepts the movement of the hinge joint as being the movement it expects. That is a principle to remember when planning a production.

Now that your puppet is completed, it is essential to see that he works. This is the time when you come to appreciate the merit of having given him only human joints. Toss him on the floor, or sit him up in a chair and then tip the chair up. You will find that every attitude he takes up is a human one—so much so that his resemblance to life is striking and fascinating. At the same time every one of his joints must be as loose and as supple as it possibly can be. When he is performing on the stage (as you will very soon find when you make your first experiments in manipulation) one half of his movements are the result merely of the pull of gravity, and as his limbs are not very heavy there must only be the minimum of friction to impede them.

The very first time I stood a puppet up and let him fall down called up a half-forgotten memory in my mind; I remembered an occasion a dozen years ago when I was in a den of iniquity at the back of the Vieux Port in Marseilles. Two Catalan fishermen there began to fight—a real honest-to-goodness duel with knives, long ones, held point upwards, thumb towards the blade as a knife should be. They were circling cautiously round each other, feet wide apart, ready to dash in or spring aside, when one of the onlookers beside the bar took hold of a bottle and brought it down with all his strength on the top of the head of one of the duellists as he circled past him. That fisherman simply crumpled up. All his joints went limp together, and he crumpled up in concertina fashion on to the floor, ending up in a heap, face downwards.

The puppet I was experimenting with reproduced the action with most vivid and startling exactitude: the collapse, the fall, the final attitude, were all identical. For a moment or two as I stared at the tumbled figure memories simply flooded into my mind. I lived again through the wild minutes that followed—the sudden battle royal, the equally sudden scattering as the alarm was given, and the wild flight in pitch darkness over what seemed at the time to be at least a thousand brick walls, each ten feet high, with the police agents’ whistles shrilling all round, and one or two revolvers popping off to urge me on.

Your puppets must do that. They must collapse completely and utterly when unsupported. When sat in a chair they must naturally fall into an attitude indicative of the utmost dejection, like a man whose children have all died and whose wife has run off with a soldier, and whose speculations have all gone wrong, and who has just lost his job, and who is not feeling very well. Any good puppet will look just like that if put unsupported in a chair. The floppier your puppet is, the handier he will be under control. Naturally, as has been pointed out, this floppiness is accentuated by weight. Make his limbs and his trunk heavy, and this heaviness will overbear the friction at the joints. That is a very good principle, but remember that you will be manipulating your puppet at arm’s length for ten minutes at a stretch sometimes, and that on those occasions you will curse the weight of the thing for at least nine of those ten minutes. Nothing heavier than oak is really necessary for puppets, and even oak is a bit too heavy. Limbs weighted with lead, and similar extensions of the principle, are not specially helpful except in stray particular instances.