PULLING THE STRINGS Jessica Douglas-Home explores the entrancing and transitory art of puppetry through the practice of the early twentieth-century sculptor and artist William Simmonds William Simmonds’s life after the First World War coincided with the second wave of the modernist Arts and Crafts movement. His fame as a sculptor was then at its height, and his impact on the art world was greatest during this period, as was the interest of critics and serious connoisseurs in his work. But second in importance to him after his work as a sculptor, and little known today, was his work on the art of the marionette – stringed puppets – and his position as one of Europe’s greatest puppet masters. This ancient form of theatre is one of the most magical forms of art, but it is ephemeral, similar in its transience to early opera, ballet and theatre before the arrival of recordings and film. Simmonds’s expertise in this field came in part from his art-school training, 14 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
but his interest in it arose to some extent by accident. As he sat by his dying father’s bedside in 1912, he reminisced about being taken as a child to the Old Windsor Music Hall. He remembered a trick puppet which walked around with its head in its hand while another, a fairy, paved the way for a spellbinding transformation scene in which the head came off to make way for a cheese, then a second cheese, then a third, until the grotesque figure had ten cheeses in place of one head. To illustrate for his father the puppet’s movements, grip and traction, he found a piece of wood and carved the figure for him. Later, delving into books, he discovered that the marionettes’ pedigree could be traced back thousands of years, and that puppet theatre could claim to be the oldest
form of dramatic art. Street-kiosk theatres had thrived in many different civilisations. Puppet showmen are recorded in India, Tibet, Burma, Africa, Persia, China and Japan. The ancient Greeks, Romans and Egyptians had their puppet shows. These stringed puppets had existed in one form or another for centuries throughout Europe, but Simmonds was most influenced by those found in medieval Italy. Records describe small, elaborately dressed and bejewelled carved images set up in the naves of churches for special occasions. These figures would perform episodes from the Old and New Testaments, and could be moved by an intricate mechanism. In the church of the Carmine in Florence, Giorgio Vasari describes a woodwork Christ leaving his disciples
