‘The ungraspable phantom of life’: why puppetry is perfect for plumbing the deep mysteries of Moby-Dick
Yngvild Aspeli, whose staging of the Melville novel forms the centrepiece of this year’s MimeLondon festival, explains the eerie magic of her craft
It is unnerving to be taken backstage after a show only to find yourself stepping over the inert, dismembered bodies of characters you’ve just seen in action. But this is Plexus Polaire, a French-Norwegian company that specialises in puppet theatre, and these players are just wood, foam and papier-mache. Yet their eerie fascination feels no less potent offstage than on, in the large-scale production of Moby Dick by the company’s founder and director, Yngvild Aspeli, based on Herman Melville’s novel.
“Puppetry is like a ouija board,” she tells me later, on a video call from the arctic village of Stamsund, Norway, where she also directs Nordland Visual Theatre. “Even if you know someone is moving the glass, you still have that doubt: maybe it is moving by itself. The puppet is an object, but it is also a medium that can give access to what is invisible, to the other side of appearances. This is a theme that comes back in all of my shows.”
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