Hit The Baby, Natasha!

Vershinin

The philosopher, the lover and the most interesting of the men to the women. Masha falls madly in love with him and they embark on a passionate love affair. He has a real hand (that of the puppeteer) allowing more potential for moment and expression - he can passionately caress Masha. When he is manipulated by Olga, the older sister, who warns Masha to let him go and Masha pries him away from Olga, his hand becomes a limp empty glove and he is unable to touch Masha. Olga carries him away and out of Masha’s life forever.

Tuzenbach

The face of unrequited love. He dies in a hopeless duel with Solyony (after realising he can never win Irena’s heart). Irena treats him with disdain and bored tolerance. He is a pop-up stick puppet. Irena operates him most of the time and often pulls him down back into his cone when he annoys her - which is most of the time. He is often left upside down hidden in his cone.

Kulgin

The teacher, Masha’s husband. In contrast to Vershin, Masha’s husband is an academic and seemingly incapable of passion but he loves her in a steady and reliable way - unappreciated by Masha who is bored and irritated. He is made like a porcelain doll, pasty and lifeless in complexion with tiny, fragile, feminine white hands that’s in contrast with the masculine and real hands of her lover. He tries to caress her with his tiny hands after the dramatic departure of her lover.

Chebutykin

He is an old man who has lived with the family for years. He is a bit senile and a dependent - hence his podgy baby’s body. He is held like one would an infant.

Solyony

Captain in the army. He has killed many men and is in love with Irina (the middle sister). He is a maverick, untrustworthy, callous and shallow. He is a made as a punch figure with two distinct profiles, from the one side he looks charming and smooth and on the other side hateful and devious.

Anfisa

Anfisa the servant is cut from the same cloth as Natasha, but is a smaller version. Natasha despises her and takes delight in bullying her.

The making of the puppets: View the way the puppets work below

A fun story
Birmingham Post

Hit The Baby, Natasha! - at the Old Joint Stock Theatre, Birmingham
May 25 2009 By Terry Grimley

Hit the Baby, Natasha!
at the Old Joint Stock Theatre, Temple Row

This engaging new show from fledgling Birmingham theatre company The Happiness Patrol, is an idiosyncratic take on Chekhov’s Three Sisters.

Writer-director Philip Holyman treads a perilous course between obvious pitfalls, yet succeeds in being neither tediously reverential nor irritatingly facetious. He achieves the difficult task of catching something of the essence of the original at the same time as allowing himself the freedom to send it up.

The spotlight has been shifted to focus on the subsidiary character of Natasha and her transformation from servant to sister-in-law, from mouse to monster. She and all of the male characters apart from her husband Andrei are played by puppets, in themselves striking creations by Caroline McDowell.

But while the men are hand-puppets to be taken out of, and put away in, a toybox as required, Natasha is played throughout by actress/puppeteer Catherine Boot.

Beginning as a plain dressmaker’s dummy with no facial features, Natasha gradually grows,progressivly wilder into a demented figure . It’s the deliberate clash of style with the sisters, who are played straight – and rather well – by Laura Ellison, Hannah O’Leary and Natalie Wilson, which gives the show its quirky compulsion.

Terry Grimley

Exciting and Original
Reviewsgate

Birmingham

HIT THE BABY, NATASHA!
by Philip Holyman after Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters

Review: Jan Pick 21 May

And then there were four.

It is astonishing how much can be done with puppets – here they play many of the characters of Chekhov’s Three Sisters in an innovative and ingenious adaptation by Philip Holyman.

The star of this show is Natasha, played by a dressmaker's dummy, cleverly operated and voiced by Catherine Boot. Holyman imagines her as manipulated and controlled by her father’s ideas, as are her future husband and sisters-in-law, and we watch in horror as we witness the shocking results as this shy, clumsy, romantic girl’s frustrated attempts to become accepted as the fourth sister, transform her into a monstrous harpy.

The three sisters, Olga, played by Laura Ellison, Masha (Hannah O’Leary) and Irina (Natalie Wilson) elicit our sympathy for their predicament, yet equally our contempt for their ineffectual lives and the petty snobbery with which they treat their new ‘sister’, horrified at her move up from below stairs and servant status.

Dan Handscomb is the hopeless and hapless brother, Andrei, from whom so much is expected and so little achieved, demonstrating his indecisive weakness and inability to satisfy any of the women in his life, as damaged by his father’s overarching presence as Natasha is by hers.

Commenting on the action and helping with the exposition of the story are Mishka and Grishka, two funny little puppets gossiping over the telephone. The other puppet characters are beautifully crafted - the army officers who momentarily breathe life into the stultifying atmosphere of the sisters’ existence, Anfisa the old nurse, Masha’s husband Koolyghin - and assume a reality and character of their own.

Philip Holyman and his company transform this Russian classic, presenting their audience with an exciting and original evening, culminating in a chilling tableau demonstrating the consequences of inaction. The sisters, who only have to do something positive to take control of their lives, fail to do so. Their fate is sealed.


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