Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler on Puppeteering

Can you tell me about some of the books that have directly or indirectly influenced your practice over the years?

The books that we have chosen are not necessarily about theatre per se, but they have had a profound influence on our practice in theatre, either because of the way that they have handled themes that we have wanted to explore but did not know how, or because they helped with practical elements of our work.

Our first book is Skin Lane by Neil Bartlett, an activist, a gay writer, a playwright, and also the director of the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith. This novel set in the sixties, is about a fifty-year-old man, a furrier, who doesn’t know anything about his sexuality. While most gay novels are about the gay, usually American, lifestyle – a kind of Los Angeles gay scene – this one is about a character who doesn’t know he’s gay. And the subtlety with which Bartlett tells about this man’s bemused discovery of his sexuality through his relationship with the nephew is very beautiful. The context is knives and fur – you’re in the middle of a very claustrophobic state of mind, a highly eroticised atmosphere.

This serendipitous read has led to your work on a new play for the National Theatre. Can you describe how that has come about?

As soon as I [Basil] read this book, I thought, I’ve got to meet this person because he is handling a theme that I have always wanted to explore in my work. Rae Smith, the designer of War Horse was also his designer and she introduced us. We met and immediately felt that we had to work together. So he put a proposal to The National, which he had not done before, and it was accepted, and so we have been working on a play together.

Why was it so important to you to do a play with a gay theme?

The first adult play we did was about two gay women, and although their sexuality was incidental to the story, very subtle, it did inform their political decisions. We wanted to find somebody who could do that, who could tell a story about being gay but in a subtle way. Neil’s solution to the problem was to do a play about a long-term relationship, which we thought would be like watching paint dry, but he said, Watch me. And so I [Adrian] made two puppets of ninety-year-old men and two puppets of nineteen-year-old men. We took two sketch puppets to London to show Nic Hytner at The National and he loved them. So it’s been a wonderful journey from reading a novel to making a play.

And your second book – still with the gay theme, but rather different!

It’s called Biological Exuberance. It’s an enormous study of homosexual behaviour amongst every kind of insect and animal. The evidence in this book is overwhelming that there is a huge amount of same-sex behaviour in the natural world. Most of the sexual behaviour amongst giraffes is same-sex, but also amongst dolphins and whales, and especially penguins. The book was introduced to us by Marthinus Basson who worked with us on Tall Horse [a play about a giraffe]. It is not a book that one reads from beginning to end, but it is a book that we refer to when people say about being gay that it’s not natural. We quote from it when the Watchtower people come around.

How has this book informed your work?

Only indirectly, but since we have always had to think very carefully about human and animal behaviour in our work, it gives us a point of reference, not just to ‘gay’ behaviour, but to how humans and animals interact in any social situation.

Your next book is something of a departure and takes you back somewhat. Why is a book about a childhood fantasy so important to your practice?

Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree is about the fantasy worlds we construct. Our work has always been about constructing worlds, and I have realised time and time again that this began for me [Basil] with this childhood story of escape and enchantment. We have often tried to buy it from an antiquarian children’s bookstore in one of those side streets near the British Museum, and when I asked them why they don’t have it the person there said it’s one of those books that if people have them they don’t ever let them go.

What is its specific relevance to your work in puppet theatre?

It’s the idea that one could climb up a tree and go into another land, a fantasy. Well into our time as puppeteers, going from city to city, I [Basil] realised that I was living the life of these books that had been so important to me as a child. I realised that we would stay in one place for three days and then move onto another place, and in each place we would create a world.