Puppetry: Hand Stories ★★★★

Designed and Created by Yeung Fai

Performed by Yeung Fai and Yoann Pencolé

Dolphin Theatre 14 – 17 February

The Chinese master glove puppeteer Yeung Fai has set out to achieve many things in Hand Stories, and he’s succeeded handsomely in all of them.

The work is a history of his family over three generations of puppeteers (there are more – Fai and his elder brother are the fifth generation of practitioners) and, by extension, of modern China.

That history is rich, and threaded with silken beauty, but the danger of sudden, capricious oppression is ever-present, and has brought tragedy and exile to Fai and his family in its wake.

Hand Stories is also about education and training, and Fai exposes his techniques, often in scenes with his “apprentice”, Yoann Pencolé.

And, of course, there’s the puppetry itself, from sheer beauty to boisterous brawling, comedy, pathos, the human condition worn on a master’s hand.

As the scenes play out, we pass down the line from father to son to son’s sons, signified by the lighting, passing and extinguishing of lamps.

It’s a fragile link, and one always with the potential to be broken; twice, in the Cultural Revolution of the ‘60s and ‘70s, and again during the Tiananmen Square protests in 198, the state (represented by a golden-scaled, rapacious dragon) tore the family apart. Fai’s father died in a “re-education camp” during the first, his brother only barely escaped to the US in the wake of the other.

Fai himself now lives in Paris, and his work cannot be seen in his own country.

Of course, for all the personal history and political commentary, an audience still wants the skills of the puppeteer and the peculiar sensation of witnessing the imitation of life in tiny figures. And Fai is, perhaps uniquely, able to deliver.

The first tableaux (one of his grandfather’s devising) is the courtship of a reluctant beauty by a portly suitor. The woman is flawless – every pitch of head, every attitude of hand, perfection. The suitor, too, is perfect in his movement, his ardour and frustration growing as she rebuffs his advances. The comedy is wonderful, drawing the first of many howls of laughter from the audience.

Just as interesting is the emotional transfer from puppeteer to puppet. Fai doesn’t operate passively in the gloom behind the puppets; he leans in, he participates in their emotions.

And he does so constantly throughout, through an exhilarating martial arts battle between two pint-size warriors (who needs Shaolin monks when you’ve got these little blokes), the rampages of the dragons and, in an inspired routine, the battle of a traveller and a tiger, played away from the audience so we could see the “backstage” workings of a puppet show.

Throughout there were examples of Fai’s unique mastery; he hurls costumes in the air and they fall into place over the puppet, he throws and spins plates in his puppet’s hands. It’s marvelous to watch.

The show loses does lose momentum once, in a sequence about his brother’s tribulations in the US featuring a puppet guardian angel who communicates in Queen songs. Fai isn’t on such solid ground here, and the sequence is a little forced and uncomfortable.

Hand Stories is back on track soon enough, as with delicious incense and soft lamplight, Fai passes his secrets on to his apprentice, and the deep mysteries of the generations overcome another crisis and go on.

I hope there are many more generations of these great artists to come.