Master of puppets
Puppeteer Adam Kronenberg's TV credits include Bambaloo, Farscape, Feral TV, and Raggs, which now out-rates Sesame Street in the US. He steps back onto the stage to reanimate the Oscar Wilde classic, The Happy Prince.
By Resli Buchel
Who pulls the strings? Can you spot the human beings?
How did you, a young theatre student from Canberra, wind up studying puppetry? At acting school [in Hobart] there was a puppet company, and I went there for twelve weeks doing a job as an actor. At the end of that they asked me to stay and train as a puppeteer and I was really happy to do it. I was a big fan of Sesame Street and The Muppets and I didn't realise that it was a passion for me.
Puppetry is a very old tradition, which is now being re-imagined using modern technology. Do you think there is a kind of puppetry revival taking place? I think so. It's one of those art forms that will never die, and I think computer graphics haven't quite matched puppetry for warmth. They are still trying to get fabrics in computer graphics that will move appropriately. Samuel L Jackson and Ewan McGregor - when they were doing Star Wars - were trying to work [opposite] a tennis ball against a wall, but with puppetry the thing is there next to you. When it moves it looks real. It's a truer illusion in that sense.
The Happy Prince combines many different puppetry techniques with new technology to bring
Oscar Wilde's fairytale to life. Yeah. There are shadow puppets, small puppets, and puppets that are part mask, and really cutting edge things such as video interacting, so it's a real privilege to work on it.
I usually don't do marionettes and things like that... but I'm also big on animatronics which is puppets that are part robot, controlled by remote control. It's a pretty broad area. I like puppetry that gets puppeteers involved and putting my body into it and echoing the shape.
The Happy Prince is clearly aimed at an audience of children, but you also perform for exclusively adult audiences. Do you have a preference? What puppetry can do is bring out the child in just about everybody. It's an old psychological trick: don't talk to a person, talk to a puppet. Puppets can be pretty dirty and you might do things with puppets that you usually wouldn't do with real actors. They are quite subversive and, what is really interesting for me is the debacle with Bill Henson's photographs being picked up by the police and banning shows. The irony of doing an Oscar Wilde show is not lost on me. It's translating into theatre and I think puppetry has the potential to be incredibly sophisticated... and it also has that wonderful thing [that] kids love it.
The Happy Prince will play at the Seymour Centre from Saturday 28 June