From 1900 to 1950

Puppetry in Britain declined in the early 20th century with audiences drawn to other forms of entertainment, including music hall, variety and cinema.

Punch and Judy were still at the seaside, and marionettes on the music hall and variety stages, but the outbreak of World War I meant that large travelling marionette shows disbanded. They could not operate without the men who went to fight.

Flyer advertising 'The Peep Show', Walter Wilkinson, early 20th century

During this time glove puppeteer Walter Wilkinson was reviving the art of glove puppet theatre which had flourished in medieval times to show the dramatic possibilities of glove puppetry beyond Punch and Judy.

He toured his 'Peep Show' throughout Britain and America in the 1920s and 1930s, setting up show wherever he could find an audience.

He carved his puppets' heads and hands, dressed them, and wrote several books about his trips telling how he packed his booth, puppets and equipment onto a cart which he pushed around the country during the summer.

Walter Wilkinson was still performing in the 1950s when his repertoire included 'Thersytes', a 16th-century morality play, 'Cassius and Brutus', and the quarrel scene from Shakespeare's 'Julius Caesar' which he described as 'Shakespeare specially disarranged'.

The wider fortunes of puppetry, however, did not begin to revive until 1923 with the publication of a book called 'Everybody's Theatre' by H.W. Whanslaw, which led two years later to the foundation of The British Puppet and Model Theatre Guild.

At first a society of keen amateurs, it soon generated expert professional puppeteers including William Simmonds, Walter Wilkinson and his brother Gair Wilkinson, Waldo and Muriel Lanchester, and John Bickerdike.

The Lanchesters opened the 50-seat Lanchester Marionette Theatre in Malvern in 1936 and toured for the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA) in England during World War II.

The London Marionette Theatre, Keystone View, mid 20th century

Waldo Lanchester (left) and Harry Whanslaw (right), seen here at the London Marionette Theatre, played a large part in the regeneration of puppetry in Britain after the war. When The British Puppet and Model Theatre Guild was founded in 1925, Lanchester and Whanslaw were amateur puppeteers experimenting with puppets and controls. After a demonstration of their work at a Guild meeting in 1926 and their first performance as the Whanslaw-Lanchester Marionettes a year later, they founded the London Marionette Theatre in Stamford Brook, in a studio above Waldo Lanchester's workshop. Jan Bussell joined the troupe, and together they evolved aspects of marionettes such as the vertical control and new types of joints and methods of balancing.

The London Marionette Theatre was the first to broadcast puppets on television, making nine broadcasts from the Baird Studios in 1933, when all the scenery had to be black and white.

By the late 1940s there were several professional puppet companies in Britain and after the war marionette cabaret became popular, with performers operating for the first time in full view of the audience, providing entertainment for Working Men’s Clubs and night clubs.

As television sets became more affordable, this increasingly popular form of home entertainment began to bring puppets to a very wide audience indeed.

Дата добавления: 2015-08-03