Into the 21st century

Anthony, Forkbeard Theatre Company, 1999

A few dedicated puppet theatres survive in Britain, often in the face of financial indifference from local authorities, but puppetry in 21st-century Britain is also finding new audiences with companies and productions incorporating puppetry into their work.

'The Lion King' continues to delight audiences on the London stage, with shadow puppetry and large body puppets developed by Julie Taymor, exploring techniques thousands of years old.

Puppetry is increasingly appreciated as a tool in education and in work with the disabled, and PuppeteersUK, the recent amalgamation under one banner of all the organisations in Britain working in puppetry, should assure the future of the art in the country as an exciting form of theatre.

Mr Punch is still celebrated annually in Covent Garden and can be found all over the country flouting political correctness and entertaining audiences just as he has done for over 300 years.

This is an image of Anthony, a life-size marionette with flailing limbs, a manic expression and rolling eyes. He was one of the star patients in Dr. Smallman's Nursing Home in 'Hypochondria', the 1987 production by the touring experimental theatre company Forkbeard Fantasy.

Made by Penny Saunders, he was the doctor's model patient in every sense of the word, consisting of so much spare-part surgery it was unclear how alive he really was.

From the 1960s onwards, British theatre experienced an explosion of new kinds of performance - street theatre, carnival, visual theatre and live art, which challenged traditional ideas about theatre. Besides traditional actors, these performances sometimes used large-scale animated constructions - part puppet, part human.

Forkbeard Fantasy have been touring experimental performances since the 1970s, combining film and theatre, and featuring strange and wonderful inventions, several using traditional techniques of puppetry to create bizarre mechanical characters like Anthony.

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