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, 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

on the Mount of Olives and being borne upwards, surrounded by innumerable angels in a cloud (made of well-prepared wool), ascending to a beautifully depicted Heaven. Towards the end of the eleventh century, marionettes began to be denounced as idolatrous by prelates and bishops. After the Decree of the Council of Trent two centuries later, they were forced out of churches.

But the little figures were never eradicated. From the sixteenth century onwards, Italian showmen were generally to be found roaming the countryside and giving performances on public roads, in marketplaces and at fairs; the puppet shows were equally popular with audiences from all walks of life. A librarian at the Vatican stopped every night to watch and admire them; the celebrated mathematician Girolamo Cardano wrote that ‘an entire day would not be sufficient in which to describe these puppets that play, fight, shoot, dance and make music’. In Florence, Cosimo I ordered marionette shows at the Palazzo Vecchio, Francesco I at the Uffizi, and Lorenzo de’ Medici at his palace.

In France the sacred figures in the cathedrals and churches had an equally chequered history, culminating in a ban in 1443, when the priests finally put their foot down during the annual ceremony in Dieppe to celebrate the victory of the Dauphin over the British. The place had become invaded by burlesque episodes from the mitouries, as they called the marionettes. Like the Italian showmen – who as a result of crossing the borders had influenced their French and German counterparts – the travelling acts moved into the French countryside, gradually integrating real people into the scenes. The lead character, modelled on the classical figure, Polichinelle, from commedia dell’arte, was metamorphosing into Guignol, a good-humoured, clever, courageous and generous fellow. The caustic and witty plots satirising life in French villages and small towns invariably ended with the triumph of good over evil, a sense of justice always prevailing. By the sixteenth century the shows were welcomed into Paris, settled themselves firmly into parks including the Luxembourg and Tuileries gardens, and were even summoned to perform at the court of Louis XIV.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the golden age of the French marionettes. The showmen developed their techniques with ever-increasing ingenuity and skill. Puppets slid on rails, they were held upright with disguised weights and counterweights, and the mise-en-scène became more elaborate, imitating and competing with the magnificence of larger theatres. Not only were the general public passionate advocates of marionette shows, but artists and writers such as Voltaire, JeanJacques Rousseau and George Sand, and musicians including Charles Gounod and Georges Bizet, also revelled in their magic.

Traditional theatres were losing their public to puppet shows to such a degree that the directors and actors called for their closure. As many had written over the centuries, and as was famously suggested by the actress Leonora Duse, puppets could be far more effective than living actors. This view was supported by many of Duse’s contemporaries, including George Bernard

Opposite Columbine and Harlequin dance to the ‘Greensleeves’ overture in William Simmonds’s new version of Harlequinade, first performed in public in 1916. Above Simmonds carving a puppet in his workshop in Oakridge, Gloucestershire, c.1930. Right Scene from the Teatro dei Piccoli’s production of Ottorino Respighi’s opera The Sleeping Beauty, which Simmonds saw in London in 1923. Shaw and Edward Gordon Craig.

It was perhaps Louis Lemercier de Neuville’s rare and exquisite puppets, performing in the tiny Erotikon Theatron on Rue de la Santé in Paris in the 1860s, which came nearest to Simmonds’s genius. But in contrast to Simmonds’s single-handed performances, de Neuville’s wooden dolls were backed up by a large group of artists, writers and musicians who looked after the lighting, the stage sets, dialogue, costumes and choice of music. According to the French press, de Neuville’s puppets were ‘modelled with unsurpassed refinement and animation … in the working and making he had lavished his heart … his most charming of all marionettes, Pierrot Guintariste … in his gesture and bearing was a masterpiece of mechanical and plastic art … the most highly perfected puppet ever created’. And another remarkable doll would ‘enter, bow in one hand, instrument

in another, seat himself, tune up and play’.

It was not the French but the Italian marionettes that Simmonds researched with most care. The wandering showmen had reached London soon after Charles II returned from France to regain the monarchy. Samuel Pepys mentions the commedia dell’arte and its star character, Pulchinello, after watching a marionette show in Covent Garden. One can hardly name a single English poet, writer or dramatist, from Geoffrey Chaucer to John Milton, through Pepys, Lord Byron and William Hazlitt, who did not somehow incorporate these stringed puppets into their works. William Shakespeare is said to have taken the idea of Julius Caesar from a puppet play of the same title performed near the Tower of London. Dr Johnson considered a fantoccini (jointed string puppet) performance of Macbeth to be no less satisfactory than when played by actors. Ben Jonson included a famous contemporary showman in his troupe for Bartholomew Fair (1614). In Jonathan Swift’s first, brilliant prose parody A Tale of a Tub (1704), puppets delve into the morals and character of the English. Some claim that Milton drew his ideas from Paradise Lost from an Italian marionette production he had once witnessed. Byron was said to have found the model for his poem Don Juan (1819) in the popular play of Punch.

Incrementally, over the decades, Italian puppets’ characters were transformed in Britain from the dashing Pulchinello into the merry, wicked, aggressive, anarchic, cackling Punch who beats up his wife, Judy, and their child. But the crude rough and tumble that dominated fairgrounds in Simmonds’s day bore no resemblance to the performances he was to give Wiltshire villagers in 1912. In his Harlequinade, a finely sculpted, delicate-costumed trio danced from scene to scene, with Harlequin (Arlecchino) eloping with his mistress Columbine (Colombina), pursued by the girl’s foolish father, Pantaloon (Pantalone), who, together with a Clown, tries to separate the lovers.

When the First World War broke out, Simmonds, now aged 36, was ineligible to enlist, and so moved to London in search of war work. In an interview with the electrical engineer Colonel Crompton, he submitted sketchbooks with his technical drawings of carts, wagons and eighteenth-century windmills. They so impressed the colonel that he signed him up immediately to work on the development of the military tank.

But at night Simmonds worked on serious pieces of sculpture, and also found time for his growing troupe of marionettes. He created scenes from classical mythology, village life, a seaside town, moving from gentle satire to shows that were pure poetry. Music had always played an important part in creating the scenes, as a stimulus to the audience’s imagination. This was true of all marionette performances. Mozart’s puppet opera Bastien and Bastienne (1768) was revered; Manuel de Falla’s first masterpiece was a chamber opera with puppets taken from an episode in Faust; Haydn composed a singspiel for marionettes in Philemon and Baucis and Der Götterath, and from 1847 the French novelist George Sand dedicated her theatre at Nohant to puppets’ music and plays.

Simmonds’s choice of music was a combination of Cecil Sharp’s English folk-song discoveries, and early music pieces which the German scholar Arnold Dolmetsch had recently uncovered in British museums and libraries. Each made technical demands as complex as those of an operetta, albeit in miniature. Song, dialogue, libretto, choreography, the building of the stage and the design of the sets – all this Simmonds had to control as he transmitted emotions through the strings into the responsive figures. His wife, Eve, made all the costumes, and accompanied each skit on a Dolmetsch spinet, virginal or clavichord.

In 1915, Emery Walker, a close colleague of William Morris, offered Simmonds his first public show at the Art Workers’ Guild in Queen Square in London – an endorsement of Simmonds and confirmation of his stature in the Arts and Crafts movement. The audiences were bewitched. The performances sold out. The Times theatre critic A.B. Walkley, who had come across Simmonds’s marionettes in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s International Theatre Exhibition and had devoted his whole column to the brilliance of the puppets, weighed in again six months later with another effusive review. His fascination with the ‘tiny figures’ had grown: he described one skit as ‘a Chaucerian play of mythological nymphs, fauns and hamadryads – which suggested a picture by a cinquecento artist illustrating a short story from his medieval legend series by Anatole France’.

After the war Simmonds and Eve moved to the Cotswolds. The marionette performances now cast their spell in country houses, village halls and, less often, in London at the Grafton Theatre. In 1927, Simmonds took his marionettes to the Tuileries Gardens in Paris, where the Theatre de Guignol puppets were still firmly installed, exuding vitality and charm.

Simmonds had seen the spectacular Italian Teatro dei Piccoli at the London Coliseum in 1923. The scale of the production was astonishing. The company had brought 500 marionettes, each 4 feet high, with 12 people to operate them at any one time on stage. They opened with a play

Scene from Richard Teschner’s 1929 production of Der Drachentöter (The Dragon Killer).

by Shakespeare. Then there was ballet, and several operas with music by Richard Wagner, Gaetano Donizetti and Henry Purcell.

Simmonds had missed out on seeing the centuries-old German shows which were still playing in repertory until the war, such as The Public Beheading of the Virgin Dorothea, or the mass of variations on Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus (1592). The young Goethe had written a Faustus satire for his own puppets in 1769, and is said to have drawn inspiration for his masterpiece Faust from a peripatetic Geisselbrecht production.

In Germany after the First World War puppet shows had become so numerous that those running them had formed a guild, with their own customs and regulations; no written scripts were allowed, even for the prompters. A puppetry apprenticeship could last several years and would involve memorising the words, songs and noises. Only after this training were puppeteers entitled to present their own shows and to wear the special attire – a large black cloak and a broad-rimmed hat. But German marionette productions in the Berlin theatres were by this stage predominantly slapstick and held less interest for Simmonds.

However, when the film of the AustroCzech Richard Teschner’s marionettes came to the London Film Society in 1932, Simmonds was interested. Born in Prague, Teschner had been a painter and sculptor before devoting his life to puppetry and had moved to Vienna to explore new techniques, much of which he derived from ancient Javanese rod puppets. He, like Simmonds, designed and made the stage, props, scenery, puppets and lighting, and wrote the dialogue and songs. Instead of projecting shadows on a screen, Teschner put his figures on an ordinary stage, and manipulated them with thin sticks from below. Sometimes he gave them German folk characteristics and made them resemble comfortable German bourgeoisie. In other scenes he created misshapen animals similar to the deep-sea monsters in paintings of the Temptation of St Anthony or in early Christian conceptions of the Inferno. At other times he looked to the East, producing a strange musician with an Assyrian headdress, or an enchantress in gorgeous stiff robes, with menacing eyebrows. Simmonds found them finely carved, subtle and beautiful. He had met his match.

It was not until 1936 that Simmonds came across another innovative and clever showman, the German puppeteer Harro Siegel. His repertoire was designed according to the trends of the emerging German musical movement of the time. Siegel had been touring with his troupe around Europe, and asked if he could visit the Cotswolds to pay homage to Simmonds – and see his puppets at work. He must surely have cribbed Simmonds’s white

Left Simmonds’s puppet Estella, dressed by Eve Simmonds, on Snowball in the play Circus, first performed in public after the First World War. Above The German puppet master Harro Siegel carved his Horse and Rider after seeing Simmonds’s puppets in Gloucestershire in the early 1930s.

horse, Snowball, so similar is the fine, prancing animal to the one that Siegel made later.

What was it in Simmonds’s performances that so entranced Siegel, the English poets, the artists and musicians of his day – not only Shaw and Gordon Craig, but the poet John Drinkwater, the composer Ethel Smyth, the Russian prima ballerina Lydia Lopokova, the musician Violet Gordon Woodhouse and countless others? Few today watch this beautiful art form. Most of us have tolerated the second-rate Punch and Judy performances which appear sporadically at village fêtes. Perhaps some recall the lightweight televised nonsense of The Muppets in the 1970s and 1980s.

But dig deeper and the old art is still there, at Stephen and Lyndie Wright’s Little Angel Theatre in Islington and the Curious School of Puppetry. In London theatres, puppets played a central role in two National Theatre productions – His Dark Materials (2003) with Michael Curry’s puppets, and War Horse (2007) with puppets by Toby Sedgwick and Handspring – and at the Old Vic, where the production of Wise Children (2018) featured Lyndie and Sarah Wright’s puppets. In Wiltshire, Devon and Cornwall, ingenious small puppet . performances can be found. Go further west to Wales, and north into Scotland, and here, too, shows are waiting to be discovered.