Venus and Adonis
Little Angel Theatre, London N1
Quirky and charming, the Royal Shakespeare Company's performance, with puppets, of the poem 'Venus and Adonis' is a surprising delight. In the intimate surroundings of the Little Angel Theatre, Michael Pennington reads the poem richly and Steve Russell evokes the courtly masque with his atmospheric guitar playing, but the real stars are the puppets.
These are mainly hand-held (although marionettes appear in the prologue and shadow puppets in the hunting scenes) and it seems incredible that their facial expressions are unchanging, so characterful are they. Venus is a wonder: ethereal and earthy, woman and faerie, cheeky and bewitching, a bit of a handful whose pertness shifts gear into suffering.
You can do rude with puppets in a way that you can't with people. (The poem is about a seduction, then about male inability to commit; Adonis prefers hunting boar to kissing his new girlfriend, even if she is the goddess of love.) In puppet theatre, you can have horses on stage and wild boar and chariots pulled by songbirds. This production, by Gregory Doran, with Steve Tiplady the director of puppetry, is the first collaboration between the RSC and the puppeteers of the Little Angel. But it left me thinking there are other dramatic poems that would benefit from this treatment.
