The puppet creators who bring Hairy Maclary to life

By JANE TOLERTON

Like a puppet on a string? Well, no, actually. The puppets in the Hairy Maclary Show are more like puppets with no strings.

In fact, some are puppets with people holding them up, others are like puppets on the ends of rods. While narrator Jackie Clarke sings her way through the Hairy Maclary books, and dancers become the famous dogs, other characters - bees, ducks, a lizard, a blackbird, spiders and mice - will be played by puppets.

Tim Denton and Annie Forbes are the puppets' supporters, literally, which means they will be out there on stage with the puppets they have made, rather than pulling the strings from behind a curtain.

But Denton swears you won't see them. They'll melt into the background.

"If the puppet has life, you stop looking at the person," he says.

He points out that, with his help, puppets can do things dancers can't, like fly across the stage or swim.

The duck, Zachary Quack, is played by two puppets, one standing upright and, as described in the book, going "pittery pattery" with the help of a little wheel between his feet. The other, "Zachary's stunt double," is already in the shape of a swimming duck and will be undulated across the stage by Denton.

Each bee is attached to the end of a fishing rod-like stick and because it has a trigger mechanism, they buzz and swivel realistically.

But what about the human characters, the likes of Miss Plum, whose legs and arms we see in the book, but never her face?

"We have made giant feet and arms," says Denton. "The audience will see hands coming down and the feet will be operated by stiltwalkers."

The characters have been made to look as much as possible like their counterparts in Lynley Dodd's books. (Dodd has not yet seen the puppets but will be in the audience for the first performance.)

There's one character whose picture does not appear in the books - a lizard, referred to when Scarface Claw "wakes up a lizard and startles a bee."

Denton and Forbes hope Dodd will "fall in love" with their lizard and make a book around him, a fate that befell that villain Scarface Claw, whose own book is being released this week in Auckland.

Denton has made shadow puppets to reproduce the scene in the book Sit where there is a picture of the dogs in silhouette as they gallop away on the horizon.

The Wellington couple's work won't be new to anyone who saw Jacob Rajan's play The Candlestickmaker, with its realistic duck.

Visitors to the 2000 International Festival of the Arts in Wellington may also have seen the man-sized kiwi which Denton "wore," making it look as if it was walking. A life-sized moa has appeared in Downstage Theatre's production of As You Like It.

The couple live and work mainly in Wellington, but Forbes was based in Auckland until 1993. Puppetry was in her blood. Her English mother won a scholarship to study puppetry in Czechoslovakia after the Second World War, before moving to New Zealand where she put on Punch and Judy shows.

"My earliest memory is of crocodiles gulping a string of paper sausages which rustled as they went down. My childhood was peopled with puppets. And out of three children, I was the one who got the bug."

She has worked with puppets since leaving school and completing her initial training in France. "I came back to New Zealand determined to make puppetry part of our culture. Very idealistic."

But walking down Ponsonby Rd just after her return, she saw a "puppeteer wanted" sign and got her chance. She began teaching her skill then went on to develop the New Zealand Puppet Theatre. In 1990 she left the company to pursue her solo career.

Denton became an art teacher, but taking part in a mask master class while at training college set him on the path to puppetry. "As I became more aware of mask, I became more aware of animating a mask - like animating a puppet. That developed into puppets and into big puppets."

In the 80s he worked on television's Public Eye. The couple started working together in 1994 and are now regarded as New Zealand's foremost puppeteers. They have also taken their work to theatres overseas and are visiting Japan in September with their performance Puppet Power.

They had both read the Hairy Maclary books to their children, who are now teenagers, but looked carefully at Lynley Dodd's illustrations to make the stage show characters. "They are very animated. As puppeteers we want to replicate that movement," says Forbes.

"One of the things I love about the books is that they are so New Zealand, so recognisable. Sit, to me, is the Auckland Domain because I used to see the dog-obedience class there."

The couple have made an inventory of puppets and paraphernalia, like 1x bone, 1x toe-tapping feet, 2 x pairs of giant hands, 1x red ball on a stick.

"Which all adds up to," says a line underneath, "960 hours of blood, sweat and tears, 50 metres of frayed nerves, 30 litres of tea, 4578 stitches of thread, 500 rivets, 10 litres of rubber latex."

The result will be seen when the curtain goes up on their own little Hairy Maclary puppet, who will start the show sitting in his basket before a dancer takes over the character. "It started out as a job, but you end up falling in love with him," says Forbes. The audience is bound to do so too.

* The Hairy Maclary Show, Maidment Theatre, from Wednesday for a week.