At any one time, the foyer of the Spare Parts Puppet Theatre easily contains more puppets than people. Characters from past performances hang en masse from the roof. They flank the doors, adorn walls and sit bunched in most corners. The company has a reputation for beautiful, mystical performances, of which The Velveteen Rabbit is no exception, and the puppets are distinct and detailed. Also like The Velveteen Rabbit, many of the productions have been adaptations of children’s or picture books, so there are massive robot-like puppets from the adaptation of Shaun Tan’s The Arrival in one back corner, and an exhibition of Cat Balloon pictures along the hallway.
The Spare Parts version of Margery Williams’ The Velveteen Rabbit is, admittedly, probably a bit cheerier than the original. The book was published in 1922 before the invention of penicillin, when the scarlet fever the boy in the story catches regularly killed its infected children, and everything they had come in contact with while sick was burned. Although everyone survives in the book, there are some dark connotations. The Spare Parts version, however, with its peppering of slapstick and colourful characters, is funny – and not just for the kids it was predominantly written for.
Like the original, it follows the story of a toy rabbit given to a boy for Christmas. The rabbit becomes the boy’s favourite toy by accident, and through his love is given the opportunity to become ‘real’. Most of the characters in the story are toys, and the puppets used are actual toys rather than marionettes or glove puppets – an action figure, a toy turkey, a couple of toy trucks, a stuffed horse on a wheeled platform, to name just a few. And so the puppeteers (Michael Barlow, Bed Bradley, and St John Cowcher), moving the toys around by hand and speaking for them in funny voices, are essentially demonstrating the fact that puppeteering is partly just an excuse for adults to play with toys.
Being a children’s production, The Velveteen Rabbit doesn’t stray far from the wooden and formulaic sort of dialogue that exists to explain what’s going on to an audience too young for subtlety, but dialogue is not what this production is about. Its strengths lie in its orchestration. The performance is marked by some extraordinarily clever staging, involving a wooden screen with a series of sliding doors and moving sets. At one point, during the scenes when the boy is ill, the bed is presented vertically with the boy in a standing position, as if we have a bird’s eye view of his bedroom. Despite the complexity of all this, the transitions are seamless, and suspension of disbelief comes naturally.
Often, a lighting designer knows they’ve done a good job when nobody notices the lighting. Here, Graham Walne’s lighting is perfectly functional, blending into the performance as seamlessly as the staging. During the bedroom scene, for example, daytime is signified by cool light filtering in through the bedhead. Darkness, meanwhile, is at least as important as light, with all of the lighting contained behind the screen, so the action takes place in the series of bright squares opening up in the pitch-black room.
This is a beautiful, completely absorbing, often very funny adaptation of a fairly stiff book written close to a century ago. It’s still a kids’ show, but rarely has a bunch of adults playing with toys been so wonderfully compelling – for the target audience and their parents alike.
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Spare Parts Puppet Theatre present:
The Velveteen Rabbit
Based on the book by Margery Williams
Director: Philip Mitchell
Adapting writer: Greg Lissaman
Designer: Zoe Atkinson
Composer: Lee Buddle
Lighting: Graham Walne
Puppet construction: Jiri Zmitko
Assistant stage manager: Sarah McKeller
Performers include Michael Barlow, Bec Bradley and St John Cowcher
Spare Parts Puppet Theatre, Fremantle
School season: 3 – 14 December 2012
General public season: 7 – 25 January 2013
