Puppets are having a moment. From La Manékine and Moby Dick at the Barbican’s MimeLondon season at the beginning of 2025 to the National Theatre’s revival of War Horse, which recently completed a UK tour, and the ongoing extravaganza of My Neighbour Totoro, still filling seats and emptying wallets in London’s West End, British theatre-makers are finding success in pulling strings. Perhaps it’s something to do with old-fashioned authenticity. As artificial reality becomes ever more indistinguishable from the real thing, and its engine rooms ever more obscure, audiences may be drawn to productions that do not seek to hide their inner workings. Or maybe puppetry simply delights us in the way it always has: as a form of play.
Kids get this. So much of early play is grounded in small worlds, arenas over which children can exert control. After all, as Leslie Jamison once observed, children “have no choice but to navigate the world as something built to a scale they don’t share” (TLS, July 12, 2019). Hence, too, their fascination with giants. Just ask Lewis Carroll, or Roald Dahl. Dahlworld, no less than Wonderland, is littered with shrinkage and distension: children being blown up like a piece of gum, surrounded by enormous humanoid insects, reduced to mice; nasty grandmothers stretched like rubber or shrivelled to a pinhead. Now a charming new RSC production of Dahl’s The BFG plays with ratio – and puppetry – to brilliant effect.
On stage in Stratford-upon-Avon, the scale functions on four levels. Giant marionettes are controlled by three people: two on arms, one on head, the puppeteers themselves doubling as legs. These monsters are the Big Friendly Giant and his not-so-friendly compatriot in Giant Country, the fearsome Bloodbottler. One scale down come the human actors, in a variety of roles; then smaller puppets; then smaller puppets still. Thus, the human BFG (played by John Leader) can be cowed by the giant marionette Bloodbottler, or the human Bloodbottler (played by Richard Riddell) can lord it over the puppet Sophie. This gives the production great flexibility and concomitant surprise and amusement. An opening scene in which young Sophie (played on press night by Ellemie Shivers) hears the rumble of a giant outside her orphanage gives way to one in which Leader’s BFG is sprinting home, cradling the larger puppet Sophie in his arms.
Tom Wells has made several adjustments to Dahl’s original. Although the other giants are gestured to (and appear, played by humans, in a memorable fight scene), the focus is largely on the BFG, with the looming threat of Bloodbottler. And the Queen – more late-arriving cameo than integral character in the novel – is here moved front and centre. Much of the narrative focuses on her struggle not to be infantilized by those around her; to be the mistress of her own destiny, a puller of strings. The action switches between the Queen’s bedroom and Giant Country, lending the play pleasing dramatic tension.
Still, Wells has stayed faithful to the classic elements. After Sophie is snatched by the jittery BFG, she finds herself in her captor’s cave. She urges him to get it over with: “Just eat me. I’m eight. I’ve had a good innings”. Having been assured of his good intentions, she must then hide in a giant snozzcumber when Bloodbottler enters. Later, she watches in amazement as the BFG catches and bottles dreams (gauzy green wisps, thrillingly whisked over the audience). There are good dreams and bad dreams, and even “trogglehumpers” (terrible nightmares), and this curious mixologist will create cocktails of them in his laboratory. His task now is to confect one that will convince the Queen (Helena Lymbery) that giants are on the rampage and the “norphans” (orphans) of Britain are in danger. Fed up with feeling like “a prisoner in my own home”, the Queen will rise to the challenge. It’s a good thing she still has her helicopter licence.
The BFG is wonderfully entertaining, a reminder, in the words of its title character, that “there is magic in the world”. Toby Olié’s puppets are brilliantly realized and the deviations from the source material smartly done. Dahl purists may grumble at certain elisions and sanitizations, and some early critics have accused the play of a lack of “confidence” (the Guardian) and “crunch and bite” (the Telegraph), but as a piece of children’s theatre, it is consistently enchanting and engaging. The dialogue is funny, with light relief provided by the Queen’s two blustering, resplendently moustachioed bodyguards; the puppet choreography is slick; and, while it could have done with a song or two (see the RSC’s long-running, money-spinning hit adaptation of Matilda, 2010), the sound design provides welcome texture. “When are they going to do the bit when they fart?”, asked my otherwise enthused ten-year-old companion. In Wells’s version, they save it until the end, and the effects make for a rousing finale.
The central relationship of The BFG is between the “runty” friendly giant and Sophie, and this version, with its palace escapades, does lose some of the original’s intensity. This is a shame, not least because the dyad is so integral to Dahlworld. Families can be noisy; attention diffused. For children used to competing among bellicose siblings and distracted parents, the allure of a single relationship with a single, attentive carer can be immense. Dahl’s oeuvre is filled with such dynamics: the boy and his grandmother in The Witches; Danny and his father in Danny the Champion of the World; Grandpa Joe and Charlie in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; Matilda and Miss Honey in Matilda. A similar relationship is central to the story of Pinocchio, now running at the Globe in a new version by Charlie Josephine. Suitable for a slightly younger audience (5+ to The BFG’s 8+), it is nevertheless psychologically acute – and there are plenty of good gags for the grown-ups.
Carlo Collodi’s tale of the wooden marionette who just wants to be a “real boy” first appeared in serial form in 1881, with a further instalment, by popular demand and with a less grim conclusion, appearing in 1883. It has since had many incarnations, including Disney’s state-of-the-art animation of 1940 (still holding up well, despite the syrup) and Guillermo del Toro’s film version of 2022, dark, foreboding and set against a backdrop of fascist Italy. Collodi’s original had a political dimension, appearing in the tumult of post-unification Italy. Written in simple, accessible Tuscan – the basis of a new national language – infused with everyday vernacular and sympathetic to the plight of the poor, it is filled with moral instruction: lessons in how to be a good child – and a good Italian.
A carpenter-compère opens proceedings at the Globe, introducing us to his “beautiful little town, where nothing unusual ever happens”. He finds a troublesome block of wood with a mind of its own, but prefers to abandon the material to his fellow carpenter, Geppetto: an innovator, a disrupter. Chiselling a marionette from the enchanted block, Geppetto aims to make his fortune at the local theatre. He is fed up with “the same old puppet show” that visits the town each year. But the marionette, too, is a disrupter. And thus he sets off, propelled by a pair of puppeteers, on his picaresque journey to self-actualization, via fire, friend, fairy, wicked fox, ponderous snail and hungry whale. Along the way, he is flattered and distracted, swindled and left for dead, but maintains that tutto va bene: “I’m happy with things exactly the way they are … I’m really happy all on my own”. It is for this lack of emotional honesty, this stiff upper lip, that the appendage above it grows. Geppetto is accorded with the same. “So you care about him?” he is asked at one point. “No”, he sniffs, nose swiftly extending. Yet in the end, he comes to love him like a son. Pinocchio learns to be a boy and Geppetto learns to be a father.
This is a delightful production. The costumes are gorgeous, the sets pleasingly artisanal. Jim Fortune has written catchy songs in a variety of styles (blues, ska, pop, big band) and there are fun performances: Steven Webb as a memorably camp Giacomo Cricket, Nick Holder as the stern-soppy Geppetto, Ed Gaughan as the grasping impresario Franzini (he of “the same old puppet show”), who announces himself like a dried-up warm-up act (“It’s nice to be back”), then heckles the “middle-class families” in the posh seats and the skinflint groundlings in the yard. He is here for his production of Romeo and Juliet, and to demonstrate that theatre is “good for you … like broccoli”. If it’s fun we’re after, there’s the panto up the road, “with Julian Clary … and the remaining Chuckle Brother”. He is also here to disabuse tourists wowed by the apparent authenticity of the Globe: “There’s a Pret round the corner that’s older than this place”.
Fidelity to the past is one form of authenticity; fidelity to the present is another; and to the future. Josephine’s Pinocchio celebrates being true to yourself and to the world as it might be, rather than as it has always been. The family in which Pinocchio ultimately finds himself is, we are eagerly told, “not traditional, not conventional”. The BFG, too, rejects what is expected of him, refusing to be a “cannybully”, just as Sophie grows to be more than a mere “norphan” and the Queen more than a passive figurehead. All prove themselves capable of performing acts of transcendence, acts of love. They show that they are not automata, not machines; not puppets.
Toby Lichtig is politics and fiction editor at the TLS.
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