Sarah Wright Performer, Puppet Designer, Prop Designer

Quotes

"In discussions and workshops, we end up with bits of paper taped, like big PostIt Notes™. Each bit of paper might be particular images that we like, or a key moment of the show or story. For example, there's going to be a butterfly that lands on a flower, because that symbolises how lost she's feeling. You've got all those things, and then you're placing them in different orders. So that kind of level of detail and just sitting at the laptop isn't from the beginning. The point where you’re sitting at the laptop is when you've got your bits of paper. You’re asking “What is the journey of the characters? What are the scenes that might happen?"

"If you're making a piece of theatre, you're asking the audience to engage their imagination anyway. A puppet is part of the imagined world created by the performance. A puppet guides our imagination and lets us into that world. We're storytellers. A puppet is play and a puppet is make-believe. It's a vital part of creating an imaginary space, and what can happen in that imaginary space. We're not trying to replicate real life. We're telling stories."

"In Ubu, Ma and Pa Ubu sail away in a boat. The boat is one of my favourite props ever. It's two flat bits of cardboard on two poles that are folded around Ma and Pa and it just looks like the flat side of a boat. There's then a moment where Ubu breaks out of the boat, and the sides of the boat become wings. She's suddenly got two massive cardboard wings. The wings are created from the boat. So there's no puppet, but the puppetry in that moment is absolutely brilliant. One minute you've got a very simple, cut out cardboard boat, and the next minute, there are wings and that boat has taken you to the clouds."

"The music of John Gay took opera music, the serious opera, and whilst not mocking it, used it as fuel to comment on the wealthy and to show another side of life. That's what Punch and Judy did: they literally played outside opera houses. That's why it was seen by Pepys outside Covent Garden. It was at Bartholomew Fair, and it was outside Covent Garden. Punch was Italian. He was more Italian than many of the operas probably were and he was taking the mickey out of the opera and making money out of opera-goers. There was this parallel between what Punch had been doing and what John Gay was doing that felt very historically apt in our use of puppets in Dead Dog in a Suitcase."