Presented by esk and Roast Productions. Quentin Blake’s Mrs Armitage on Wheels has been developed in association with Eagle Eye and Little Angel Theatre and based on the BBC animated series Quentin Blake’s Box of Treasures, available on BBC iPlayer. We sat down with Maia to talk about this production.
Mrs Armitage’s inventions feel endlessly inventive and joyfully impractical. How did you approach translating Quentin Blake’s distinctive drawings and animated energy into puppets that live and breathe on stage?
Adapting any book for the stage always poses such an exciting challenge for me because it’s all about getting the right balance between the responsibility to be faithful to those recognisable, loved characters while also wanting to push my own creativity and add some of my own imagination into the fold.
With Quentin Blake’s illustrations specifically it’s been a joyful task. His illustrations are so distinctive and expressive and have a real mischievous energy about them, so it was really exciting to translate them into 3D objects with that same sense of mischievous movement.
The puppetry that you will see onstage has been a real collaborative effort. Every artist on the project has contributed to bringing Breakspear and Mrs Armitage’s inventions to life – lines have been added into songs, playful spaces and platforms have been created on the set, costumes have been adapted to suit movements and provide sneaky storage, gaps have been left within the narrative for us to continue to play throughout rehearsals and talented puppeteers have been hired to help us skilfully bring things to life… it takes a village!
Puppetry often sits somewhere between the visible and the invisible. What conversations did you have with the director about when the audience should “see” the puppetry at work, and when they should simply believe in it?
This is a great question! Samantha (our director) was quite clear from the start that Breakspear and the hedgehogs were essentially ‘real’ characters and were different from the imagined object characters that Mrs Armitage conjures up.
That being said, I do love theatrical puppetry because it really invites the audience to suspend their disbelief and invest their own imaginations into what they are watching. As an audience member, we can literally see that the dog is a puppet, being held up by a puppeteer – we know it’s not actually real. Yet through convincing movement and focus, we choose to erase the puppeteer out of the picture and see the dog as a real, living, breathing character with true emotions.
When I was younger, I remember watching a magician perform a trick and being amazed. He then revealed exactly how he did the trick, which you might think would take that special magic out of it. However when he then repeated the trick, despite the fact that I then knew exactly how he was doing it, he still amazed me and actually it felt even more magical! Although I knew how he was doing it, he still fooled me. I think puppetry creates that same sense of wonder – we know exactly what’s going on and can see all of the inner workings on display, and yet we still choose to see real life in the objects. I love that.
This show is aimed at very young audiences, but Blake’s work always carries layers for adults too. How do you design puppetry that sparks wonder for children while still engaging the imaginations of the grown-ups watching alongside them?
It sounds cheesy but I really do believe that puppetry is for everyone. For me, it’s all about creating a puppet that has enough detail to sell a character, but also leaves enough of a blank canvas to invite the audience to add their own imagination onto it. Puppetry is all about losing yourself in the art of play – children are already experts at this and I hope that for the adults watching, it’ll be a joyful reminder of the power of imagination and the art of letting go.
Mrs Armitage is an inventor who solves problems by making things. Did you see any parallels between her creative mindset and the process of designing puppets, where trial, error, and play are essential?
Ohhhhh loads haha!! Mrs Armitage would be a great puppet maker actually…. our workspaces and ways of thinking are actually scarily similar. There was a moment during our R&D period where I was watching Mrs Armitage tinkering around in her chaotic shed, gluing objects to other objects and being totally lost in her own unhinged, creative thoughts and it all felt very familiar!
I think that if we’re lucky, we should all possess a bit of Mrs Armitage’s spirit. She looks at the world through a creative lense and solves problems through play and trial and error which is how I like to work.
The story celebrates community, collaboration, and generosity. How does puppetry, as an art form that relies so heavily on teamwork, help reinforce those themes on stage?
You’re spot on there – puppetry is all about collaboration and everything that you see on stage throughout this performance will be a demonstration of that. The entire creative team has worked so closely to make sure that each of our departments enriches and supports each other.
I think probably the most direct example of collaboration within the show is with Mrs Armitage’s bicycle which is truly a feat of collaborative imagination and strength. It’s a good metaphor for the story, really: none of these inventions – or this show – works unless people are willing to lend a hand, literally.
You’ve worked across large-scale productions and intimate family shows. What excites you most about creating puppetry for a festival like ‘Imagine’, where curiosity and imagination are very much at the centre of the experience?
A festival like ‘Imagine’ gives you permission and encouragement to be wonderfully curious and unapologetically playful. You know that the audience has come in with their imagination already switched on, so you can be a bit braver: show the inner workings, invite them to fill in the gaps, trust that they’ll meet you halfway. I think festivals also give you direct access to reach new audiences who may not have otherwise heard about or engaged with your work. Fingers crossed there’ll be some people out there in the audience who may be watching puppetry for the first time, so I hope to entertain and inspire them.
Listing info and tickets can be found here.
