Strings attached

`Oy know how they do that." Why does his mother not strangle him? We're sitting in the Lambert Puppet Theatre in Monkstown, Co Dublin, and the child with the DART accent behind us is bent on destroying the magic for our three charges. In fact, the other children probably blithely ignored him and got on with sliding through the twists and turns of the story of the Widow Twankey, Aladdin and Princess Jasmine, tiny hands clapping along with the tunes as if moved by strings. The murderous instinct is more likely this adult's defence of her own childhood.

Eugene Lambert still warms up the audiences at his puppet theatre with Judge, the white, woolly dog from Wanderly Wagon. The thirtysomething parents just love it, and the children like it too. But now this thirtysomething's lip is wobbling, and she's about to throw in her lot with the boy with the DART accent after all. Because Judge has changed. He has a different voice. No longer friendly and befuddled, as on his hit single (excuse me while I consult my record collection) It's A Dog's Life, but more like Eugene Lambert's ventriloquist's dummy, Finnegan.

As both puppets and audiences change and grow, making sure they are well met demands constant vigilance. Lambert this year celebrates 25 years of manipulating his cast of puppets to create magic at his Monkstown theatre, and 25 years of manipulating the magic in the hearts of young and old. It's an onerous task, because magic is such a precious commodity. In his huge, rambling house on the seafront, its mews converted into the theatre, Eugene Lambert works seven days a week negotiating these meetings between puppets and audiences. They are meetings which will go nowhere if Lambert does not first work out a good relationship with his puppets. Finnegan, his bold boy of a ventriloquist's dummy, evolved when Lambert was a child himself, but the relationship has changed now, he says: "We've grown up together, but he's stopped growing and I've got older." In any case, he says, the relationship has naturally become more relaxed because Lambert is now less dependent on Finnegan. Finnegan still has engagements - my interview with Lambert ended dramatically because Finnegan was called out to launch the Government's new measures for the disabled - and can still coax laughs easily by taking the lard out of Lambert: "I'm going to sing and he clears his throat." Lambert quotes Finnegan in conversation: "Finnegan used to have a joke that this was the only house on the road with wall-to-wall children."

Gone are the glory days, however, when Finnegan's assertion that Lambert had been claiming children's allowance for him for years occasioned substantial overtime in the Department of Social Welfare to establish the truth or otherwise of the statement of a ventriloquist's doll. The family of puppets in Monkstown has grown to include Sheikhs of Araby, Alice in Wonderland, characters from Oscar Wilde tales, the full casts of more than 30 shows which are in repertoire. It has grown even faster than the Lambert family itself, which steadied at 10 some time in the 1960s. At this time, Lambert's wife Mai quipped in an Irish Times interview: "You'd find him muddling puppets and children."

There is hardly any evidence of an Irish puppet tradition, although Lambert recalls that Jonathan Swift mentioned a Streetch's Puppet Theatre in Capel Street in 1716: "He wrote Gullivers Travels soon afterwards, and I wonder was he influenced by the puppet theatre." No amount of questioning can really clarify why one boy in the family of three of a Co Sligo librarian began putting his soul into inanimate things to make them live. "I reassembled a lobster," he states. "Then when I was a child I started making string puppets. I made a goat which could eat a shirt. Then he swallowed it, you know." Old newspaper clippings reveal a relation's story that he first became interested in ventriloquism "that time you scared your brother Jackie out of bed when you threw your voice underneath". But the origins of the obsession with puppets in the mind of a boy who had never seen one before he made one will always be obscure.

Feverish private study continued throughout childhood and adolescence, and survived the trauma of Lambert Senior's death when Eugene was 15. And so it was that Eugene and his new wife Mai arrived in Dublin in 1950 with 10 shillings and two cases - one of them carrying Finnegan.

Lambert began his career in "heavy refrigeration", walked two bus-stops to save a penny, and they lived on onions and white sauce: "Mai is a wonderful cook now, of course", he adds hastily as the same Mai approaches with coffee. "Then Mai entered me for a talent competition." "In sheer desperation for money," adds Mai.

This led to 13 weeks' work at the Queen's Theatre (which was on Pearse Street), a round of private functions, a tour of the UK, and an offer of work in the US: "I was never keen on going. I think I was always a home bird and wanted to build up something here." Consternation follows his revelation that he also did ventriloquism for the radio - but no, it was for the travelling stage show which accompanied Din Joe's radio show. At the beginning he carved the head of his ventriloquist's doll, but it was too heavy, and he made a mask from the carved head. Now he makes a cast and forms the puppets from plastic wood.

It was television which made Lambert, as O'Brien, a household name. His work was perfect for the arts and craftsy, consciously Irish feel of the early RTE. Murphy Agus A Chairde was followed by Wanderly Wagon, which trundled through the lives of children for 17 years. Lambert and the producer, Don Lennox, began with the idea of a bicycle and a tent, a throwback to the fit-up days, and this developed into the magic wagon: "We got to buy a horse, which was a great breakthrough. They had a person to look after him and a stable. Then he got colic or something on the lawn. The poor horse passed away and it was the best-kept secret because we kept on using the footage."

Although the horses began to change colour dramatically from frame to frame, no-one ever noticed: "It was a magical thing, you see. Magic has gone out of children's lives, with consumer culture.

"I get the same reaction with Judge and Crow now as I did before. Children haven't changed, it's the adults who are to blame. The pressure that's on children now. The pressure of exams and being better. When you look at my background - I was always an avid reader from the age of four. Now any book I want to buy, I buy it. I have always believed that you can find out anything you want. Now there are professional students doing courses, who can't find out a thing. In the old days when I did variety shows, the people were much more primitive, in a way. Finnegan was real - was magic. Now they're as sophisticated in the country as anywhere."

He points to a "reverse effect", however - of adults bringing their children to puppet shows as a reaction to the dominance of TV culture. The decision to locate his theatre in the heart of south Co Dublin - made by studying trends of private bookings as a ventriloquist - was a masterstroke. But when they went to see the house in Monkstown - a house so big my artisan's cottage would fit into the kitchen - the vendor didn't want them to risk life and limb by viewing the mews which became the theatre.

Lambert eventually gave up his refrigeration career, "which was a big decision, because we had 10 children". Why so many? "We didn't think about it, Mai and I," says Lambert. "We were very happy." The 10 Lamberts were recruited into the family business as naturally as children on the family farm. Gene Lambert, the painter, recalled in 1984: "Little did we know that we had all entered show business professionally, including Mai, my mother. Murphy Agus A Chairde was the first series we did for television. The studio. Connor in a carrycot in the corner. The rest of us standing on rostra of varying heights in order to manipulate the marionettes. The door locked. The red light on. We take. Once. No chance of doing it again. The anxiety of watching the programme as it went out, which was then rigorously analysed for mistakes. Eugene's criticisms were always pointed. He did not conform to the stereotyped image of a father. He was The Boss. We were expected to be professionals." At one point tensions ran so high between Eugene and Gene that they did not speak to each other - except as the voices of Judge and Mr. Crow on Wanderly Wagon.

Rebelliousness there may have been, but every single one of Lambert's 10 children works in the arts, and nearly all of them still work with their father: Judy makes a living making models of buildings, a career which started with a Punch and Judy stage; Stephen is a teacher and puppeteer; Miriam dresses the puppets and does the voices, and also runs the highly successful annual International Puppet Festival; David is a stone sculptor and a "wonderful manipulator"; Paul does Bosco; Jonathan is a mime artist; Noel is a puppeteer, works in animation and composes all of the puppet theatre's music; Liam is a puppeteer; and Conor is a puppeteer and stand-up comic. It's no wonder Lambert pere is proud, but there are many ways in which children can never quite come up to puppets: "I love it because you can have complete control of the whole thing," he says. "You can make your performers."