Whereas The Whale’s Tale sees the notion of puppetry writ large (or rather inflated), Terrapin Puppet Theatre (from Hobart) opts for a minimalistic and whimsically inventive mode of presentation. Rather than using conventional puppets as characters, two men play the central characters and use the household objects they have to hand as their means of illustrating their salty old seafarer’s yarn.

Pitched at ages 4 to 10, according to the brochure, Boats has both adventure and romance, playing as it does with the male sailor’s age-old emotional conflict between his love of the sea and love of a woman. As told by Irish Nic (Jeff Michel), a relaxed and quietly commanding ‘old salt’, it all starts with a song – ‘The day that the sea brought my sweetheart to me’ – because stories told by sailors always do.  

His tale is about Jof (Quinn Griggs), who joins him to share the storytelling load. Jof is more keen to include the stormy and scary bits than Nic is, probably because he – Jof – was born in a crows nest during a storm. It’s Jof who knots the rope that becomes the seagull that brings him luck by appearing aloft each day – except when it doesn’t.

In brief, when a shipwreck brings him and his parents ashore and they join a circus, he meets Eliza, who loves the sounds of things, including his voice and the stories he tells. She says very little except to observe that despite his great proficiency with rope and knots, he cannot tie himself down. And so he goes to sea again, and it’s not until he meet another old salt who regrets choosing the sea over his ‘girl’ that Jof reconsiders …

Sound effects are created on-the-spot using microphones and a digital sampler to record sounds extracted from unlikely sources – e.g. a rolled up leather belt delivers the creaking of a ship at sea. Unfortunately the mechanics of this activity is hidden from view through bad sightlines rather than because it is secret. Making it clearer how this is done would add value to the show, I’m sure.

The story itself gets a bit convoluted at times, lacking definition and/or a clear purpose, especially when the stories of two other are stirred into the mix. Or maybe the story’s role in creating the circumstances for the next bit of ingenious ‘puppetry’ is what causes the convolutions. But there is no doubt the young audience will leave the show full of ideas about using ordinary objects in whole new ways.

A bread roll, knife and tea spoon make a ship, for example. And tea cups are ingeniously used to create an old Japanese tuna fisherman (the closest we come to a conventional puppet), and to suggest a passing pod of dolphins before the climactic sequence, whereby Nic and Jof create the proverbial storm in a tea cup.  

The question of whether Jof survived this final storm leaves us with the metaphysical proposition that a dead man has helped to tell his own tale, thus living on in a ‘hereafter’ of sorts. Terrapin Puppet Theatre is not inclined to play down to some perceived level of childishness. They appreciate, it seems, that children live in an adult world and extract meaning and value from anything that captures their hearts and imaginations. I concur.

As with other Capital E National Arts Festival shows, the are public performances on the next two Saturdays, and non-school audiences can attend during the week, space permitting.
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