The Puppet Company - CarPets - Tiger Hand Puppet

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Place the tiger’s ears and glue them to the top corners of the tiger’s face. Glue the pink inner ears to the middle of the outer ears. He points to the independent movement of each of the tiger’s joints, secured by bungee rope to the spine, making it elastic and responsive. “As it rises, you can see one piece going against another,” he says. “You can really identify the movement. If this was all one thing, half of that movement would be lost. You wouldn’t get the language of the muscle.” We’ve been hoping for a reaction like the Oliviers for so long”, said Finn Caldwell, puppetry and movement director.

This appealing Hansa Tiger Hand Puppet has a story to tell, about his jungle experience. Ideal for interactive play, hand puppets can be story tellers, adventurous friends, confidantes or an educational tool and more. It’s now up to the guiding puppeteer, that means you, to work your magic. Ms Hytten, who first started learning puppetry as an 11-year-old, dedicated the award to all puppeteers. Fold a strip of orange paper lengthwise. Then fold down the top edge to meet and overlap the bottom edge, securing it with glue or tape. Fold the paper in half with the seam on the outside, fold over the flap, and flip it over to fold the other side, creating an “M” shape with the point in the middle of the mouth and the long sides as finger slots.NB: It’s interesting how people see them as quite realistic, despite the fact that they’re fragmented, they’re battered, not all parts of the animals exist. He went on to say that the National Theatre’s production of Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse helped to change the image of puppetry, although there are still challenges. It took a team of eight to build the puppets and a week for the puppeteers to get used to them. The project could have gone badly wrong. On its voyage to the stage, a hallucinatory tale of 227 days at sea could easily have drifted off course. “I had no idea how to do it,” says designer Tim Hatley. “And that’s what appealed.”

Are there more puppets than actors on our stages at the moment? Well, perhaps not quite, but this is certainly a golden age of puppetry in British theatre — from Life of Pi, Frozen, The Ocean at the End of the Laneand The Lion King in the West End to Animal Farm on tour, and the upcoming 101 Dalmatians at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre. Crucially, puppets can make the impossible seem possible. Teamwork is vital, says Romina: “Each puppeteer brings a different energy and you have to tune in with them. I did the show for 15 months in London and we were still finding new things in the last week. We keep learning from each other. We have a rotating system because it would be too physically demanding to play the tiger every night, so we get to watch each other. When you’re in the puppet you can’t tell if what you’re doing looks good so you have to rely on your teammates to tell you. It’s very collaborative and a lovely way to work.” And everyone else is playing with us too: lighting, sound, staging. The goat you fell in love with, that is deliberate. We’ve purposefully put in a scene where the goat plays with a young child. Then we bring the goat on and it’s bleating, and we’ve done the lighting so you can’t quite see the tiger approaching it, which makes it more frightening.Akash says: “I’m a 6ft guy, when I’m on stage you see me. The puppet is the dominant figure and the three puppeteers are part of it. When you surrender to the puppet, it can take over your emotions. It makes me feel strong, grounded and emotional - I feel like a tiger.” Finn Caldwell, co-puppet designer and puppetry and movement director for Life of Pi, knew the show's director Max Webster from collaborating on several previous productions. "Weirdly we were doing promotional work for The Lorax, and I said to Max in a lift ‘Wouldn’t Life of Pi be good? Look at all the time between the boy and the tiger, wouldn’t that be exciting?’ And he said: ‘That’s so strange: I’ve just been approached about Life of Pi. I thought it was unstageable, but if you’re excited I’ll look at it again.’" FC: I think part of bringing a puppet out on stage on a subconscious level is when you’re saying to the audience “Shall we all believe this is real?” Then they’re playing with us; adults remember how to be kids, playing with their toys. They’re emotionally invested in the characters because they’re taking part in the process. So when those characters get hurt or die or feel joy, the audience feels like they did as a child when their toy succeeds or fails.