I designed and created a life-size crocodile puppet for The Crocodile opera, based on a short story by Dostoevsky. The opera, directed by Alex Sutton, with music by Llywelyn ap Myrddin and conducted by Timothy Burke, was staged at The Arcola Theatre in London in August 2007 as part of the Grimeborn Festival.
The show is set against two polar boundaries of normalness and non-normalness, or insanity and reality. The real world with singers in period costume – a rational world for the characters, where the logic of their world works perfectly well – is destroyed when a crocodile comes along and totally trashes this balance and the absurdity of it all makes the characters go mad. The crocodile puppet had to be playful, yet with enough realism that it could invade this normal world and make it absurd.
It was a challenge to make the puppet within time and budget constraints but the end was quite successful!
CLIENT: Arcola Theatre
SECTOR: Arts & Culture
YEAR: 2007
