"Reading
more into it" - some further quotes old and new
"The
wide, arched alcove at the side of the spacious foyer outside the stalls
of the Olivier Theatre is ideally suited for the puppet stage and late on
Monday afternoon the Jactito Puppet Company, using their own fit-up stage,
presented "Starship Exodus".
This piece, with its fantastic space-fiction atmosphere, captured the imagination
of children and the two puppeteers of the company Joan and James Barton,
have found that the appreciation of the children is whetted if they are
accompanied by adults.
It was obvious at the Olivier that the adults were also enjoying, in their
own way, the fantastic world created by the puppeteers, their puppets and
the magical music.
The
children too, clearly enjoyed very kuch the music - part of Stravinsky's
scores for "Petrushka" and "The Soldiers Tale" and Satie's
"Gymnopedies" - and the music helps much in establishing the mysterious
world of the planet Exodus, inhabited by creatures very unlike those to
be seen on planet Earth. Designed by james Barton and costumed by his wife,
these creatures have very strange shapes. Their heads were particularly
strange and imaginative. One head, chiefly made of wire, was quite transparent
and one creature had three heads.
There was a slender thread of a story and a certain amount of dialogue and
of narration by a glove puppet with a mouth moving in a delightfully exagerated
way; but the main emphasis was on the space-fiction puppets making odd movements
evoked by puppeteers manipulating one or more rods".
Daily Telegraph
....
....