Puppetry How to Do it

A practical, accessible and inspiring guide to using puppetry in theatre – the perfect entry point for anyone looking to use puppets in their productions, to explore what puppets can do, or to develop their puppetry skills.

Written by an experienced theatre and puppetry director, Mervyn Millar’s Puppetry: How to Do It focuses on the performer and the craft of bringing any puppet to life. No puppet-making is required to use this book: starting just with simple objects, it lays out the skills required to unlock a puppet’s limitless potential for expression and connection with an audience.

Inside you’ll discover fifty practical, easy-to-follow exercises – for use in a group or on your own – to develop elements of the craft, build confidence and help you improve your puppetry through play and improvisation. Also included are sections on different types of puppet, thinking about how the puppeteer is presented on stage and how to direct and devise puppet performances.

Ideal for actors and performers, for directors and designers, and for teachers and students of all ages and levels of experience, this book will demystify the art of puppetry, and help you become more confident and creative with all kinds of puppets and objects on stage.

‘This is a superb guide to puppet manipulation by one of the world’s most experienced puppetry directors and teachers at a time when many actors are seeing puppetry as the twenty-first century’s evocative and powerful new performance medium’ Basil Jones, Handspring Puppet Company

‘This book captures Mervyn’s playful and accessible process for working with actors to develop their puppetry skills – it’s like having him in the room’ Lucy Skilbeck, Director of Actor Training at RADA

‘Mervyn Millar has a unique perspective on the meteoric rise of puppetry in British theatre having witnessed it from the inside. He was resident at the Puppet Centre Trust at BAC when Improbable Theatre were exploding theatrical form in 70 Hill Lane and Animo. He was studying with Handspring when they created the exquisite and game-changing giraffe puppet in Tall Horse. He was present from the earliest experiments at the National Theatre Studio in which puppetry and “poor theatre” were combined to create the performance language of War Horse. There is no one better placed to reveal the techniques of puppetry which made these changes and these shows possible.’ Tom Morris, Artistic Director of Bristol Old Vic, and Co-director of War Horse

‘More and more contemporary actors are adding puppetry to their arsenal of performance techniques. Here is a very timely guide to what is required from the actor to give life to the performed object as developed from Mervyn Millar’s own deep practical experience’ Adrian Kohler, Handspring Puppet Company

‘Based on the workshops he developed for training performers for War Horse, Mervyn has written this book to share his craft… the exercises are clear and easily reproducible for many different types of participants… a wonderful gift to the field of puppetry. I hope that it will be used widely to introduce adventurous spirits to this dynamic art form’ Cheryl Henson, President of the Jim Henson Foundation, from her Foreword