There are no words, only music, and thanks to the pillar I feared that my inability to draw the piece together into a cohesive narrative was because key moments kept disappearing. The after-show talk shed more light on the sections I had missed and I was able to find my own understanding through Mottram’s discussion of the origins of the piece.
One word: fascinating. It’s hard to describe because it’s not a linear narrative piece; there is a connection between the images, but they are, as Stephen Mottram described them, a ‘series of installations’ that evoke emotion and that emotion or reading, is entirely an audience member’s own.
Originally created in 1995 as a response to the sudden death of his father, Mottram explained that he wanted to create characters that cannot be clearly defined as good or bad, they merely do what they have to do in order to survive. The world of the characters is simple: everyone contains seeds and everyone wants those seeds in order to gain ‘new life’. The production is dark in both content and lighting design, as the whole piece is performed in a half-light, expressing the inherent ambiguous unease. But there is lightness to be found in some of Mottram’s enchanting marionettes. When asked why one of the seed-carriers disguised itself as a stork, he explained that the idea grew from a joke about ‘bending over backwards to survive’.
Mottram is more of a magician than a puppeteer: he epitomises the notion of bringing an object to life. He even showed us the mechanics of some of his puppets, but it didn’t take away from them, if anything, it made them even more magical.
