It is unnerving to be taken backstage after a show only to find yourself stepping over the inert, dismembered bodies of characters you’ve just seen in action. But this is Plexus Polaire, a French-Norwegian company that specialises in puppet theatre, and these players are just wood, foam and papier-mache. Yet their eerie fascination feels no less potent offstage than on, in the large-scale production of Moby Dick by the company’s founder and director, Yngvild Aspeli, based on Herman Melville’s novel.
“Puppetry is like a ouija board,” she tells me later, on a video call from the arctic village of Stamsund, Norway, where she also directs Nordland Visual Theatre. “Even if you know someone is moving the glass, you still have that doubt: maybe it is moving by itself. The puppet is an object, but it is also a medium that can give access to what is invisible, to the other side of appearances. This is a theme that comes back in all of my shows.”
Moby Dick, a centrepiece of this year’s MimeLondon festival, is the third Plexus Polaire piece I caught last autumn in France. Each is distinct in scale and subject, but all mix live actors with puppets, and share a profound sense of being haunted. In her remarkable version of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Aspeli plays Nora, voicing both that character and the puppets who form her household, while spiders increasingly encroach upon her domesticity to undo what she thought was real, or imagined. In Dracula – Lucy’s Dream, Aspeli melds the figure of Lucy with the vampire’s brides in a psychosexual drama that tangles forbidden desires with fantasies of control and submission. Again, actors and puppets – the unliving and the undead – swap and sometimes merge roles. Moby Dick turns on the character of Ahab, his mind unmoored by oceanic visions of the infinite, obsessively hunting the white whale only because he is haunted by it.
Earlier works likewise thrive on ambivalent scenarios: a man and his missing hand, an arsonist burned by inner demons, the troubled life and mind of radical feminist Valerie Solanas. All these are adult subjects given serious artistic treatments, and it strikes me that the question guiding Aspeli’s approach is not what theatre can do with puppets, but what puppets can do for theatre.
Aspeli concurs. “I don’t use puppets to replace actors. Instead I ask: what can the puppet do that the actor cannot? What can the actor do that the puppet cannot? The relation between actor and puppet interests me very specifically, and it lets me work on parallel levels at the same time.”
As a child in Norway, Aspeli already had those parallel interests: theatre, and making things with her hands. Initially she considered studying stage design but instead left for the famous Jacques Lecoq theatre school in Paris, where she gained a sense of the stage as a meeting place for many “languages” – physical, visual, verbal, musical – and then she attended the National School of Puppetry Arts in Ardennes. “For me,” she remembers, “puppetry became like another language, another way of communicating a story.” Nowhere is she more polyglot than in Moby Dick, which combines puppets, actors, props and models with text, lights, music (visceral rock, played live on stage for the MimeLondon season), and stage-spanning video projections that allow her to show the vanishing tail of the great white whale, or the slow passing of its enigmatic eye.
“Moby Dick started from a sentence in Melville’s book that describes the ocean as a gigantic graveyard of people who have disappeared at sea,” she recalls. “I wanted this production to be like dead sailors retelling the story. Puppets can bring those characters to life, without being alive themselves.” Such equivocations between the living and the dead, between mechanics and metaphysics, make puppetry an apt medium. What the narrator Ishmael says of the sea could also be said of this art form: “It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.”
It is also a novel about magnitude. “I use scale a lot in this production,” Aspeli continues. “I can zoom in and zoom out with different sized models. Moby-Dick is a story about nature and scale: how small we are in these little boats next to the whale or the ocean. How deluded is Ahab, who thinks he is somehow larger than life.”
If Ahab’s hubris drives his personal drama, something else seems to drive Ahab: his secretive, close-at-hand crew of “five dusky phantoms” led by the mysterious Fedallah, Ahab’s “dark shadow” who delivers the prophecy that will seal his fate. “I think of the puppeteers as like Fedallah’s crew,” says Aspeli. “Sometimes they linger in the shadows, sometimes they are invisible. But they control the characters and their destiny.”
A thought comes to her: “Did you know that in French, a puppeteer is called a manipulator? It’s very literal! I guess that makes me a professional manipulator.” We both laugh. But what moves her? She searches for words, then offers: “Puppetry has an aspect of something else that is in our self, somehow.” Something haunts her, too, then.
MimeLondon begins on 14 January. Moby Dick is at the Barbican, London, 22-25 January. Sanjoy Roy’s trip to France was provided by the Barbican
