Stephen Mottram describes himself as an entertainer but in fact, he is a puppet-master, controlling the strings, deciding the movements, choosing the moment. In his house in Oxford, where I went to talk to him, he leaned forward, his eyes constantly on my notebook, to check a date or correct something I had written. To retain control of what I was doing, I found myself angling the notebook away from him and writing unintelligible squiggles that I hoped he couldn't decipher. Was I metamorphosing into one of his puppets, I wondered, the one who wanted to outwit the puppet master?
Although The Seed Carriers, starting a three-night run tonight at the Lambert Puppet Theatre as part of the International Puppet Festival, is about fear and vulnerability, Stephen Mottram's workshop is all about order and control. Neat rows of tools line the wall of the tiny room. Small pots of paint stand alongside smaller jars of screws. On the carpet - yes, a carpet in a workshop - there is not even the tiniest wood shaving to be seen. On the wall hang his puppets, still and unmoving, waiting for the master to breathe life into them.
And when he does, I could almost weep, for there, in this small, Oxford room, with the noise of city traffic outside, a small creature, eyeless and genderless, floats gently on its back through the invisible waters of life, like a human not yet born, its small torso rising and falling, its delicate feet pushing it gently round and round what it cannot possibly know is the puppet master's workshop. And then the spell is broken, the waters recede, the traffic gets louder and the puppet is hung up on the wall again, lifeless. I stop holding my breath.
Stephen Mottram was afraid of things as a child, a bit paranoid about his own existence. "I used to look at ants, so small, so busy and wonder did anyone know they were there. Did anyone know I was there." In 1979, he completed a degree in International Relations, which included a year studying in Moscow. "It was during Reagan's time, with Star Wars, deterrents and the neutron bomb."
Not a time likely to promote feelings of personal safety in someone already concerned about it and he left the field to study puppetry - in which he had already become interested, after seeing the Obraztsov Puppet Theatre in Moscow. A grant took him to Budapest, where he has since returned with his own show.
He has taken his shows to venues all over the world, including numerous ones in the former Soviet bloc where his knowledge of Russian has come in handy. He devised The Seed Carriers in 1993, and has had it on the road more or less ever since. Its subject matter - survival in an alien world where human beings are rarely cherished or valued for themselves - seems to be one that people want to explore and to which they constantly return. Survival, Mottram says, is paramount in every field and people, he has noticed, will bend over backwards, literally, to conform, both in clothes and in language - for in conformity lies the illusion of safety.
According to Richard Dawkins's theory, in The Selfish Gene, we are losing our identity and our individualism and becoming nothing more than a vehicle for regeneration, the entity being more important than the whole, the seed more important than the person who contains it. In The Seed Carriers, 40 creatures - small, crunchy people, in Mottram's words - start life in chrysalis form, are born, live their lives and die, some violently, for they inhabit the harsh, cruel world of natural selection.
The creatures are featureless, unclothed, mouths open as if in a permanent cry. But as they move round on their different treadmills, the question is, are they trapped in life or protected from it? Not even the puppetmaster has the answer to that one, despite the fact that he is in the odd position of being able to breathe life into the lifeless. Does this make him feel powerful? "No. They're not real creatures, these puppets. You don't have to bring them alive, only make the audience think they're alive. And you can do that by giving out coded bits of information, bypassing the cognitive process."
The areas he is exploring - fear, vulnerability, the loss of individualism - are disturbing ones and often, after the show, the audience will be invited back in again to discuss it. Stephen Mottram talks a lot about vulnerability and indeed, he looks vulnerable himself - a man of slight build, with a worried face, displaying an anxious concern that his work is understood. He seems to consider many things a threat - birth and death among them, although he has witnessed neither. "They are both very poetic," he amends, "and of course not always violent."
When putting together a show, he works with a collective, usually a team of about five or six people, who come together for the duration. The music for The Seed Carriers has been written by Glynn Perrin, with whom he has worked before. Once the show is on the road, the team drops to two - Mottram and a technician. The puppets are transported, usually in a van, and travel by sea. Mottram makes them himself, and the fruit of his craftsmanship can only be described as miraculous as he fashions his creatures from nothing more exotic than roof timber. "I start with movement, with an idea of the sort of movement I'm looking for." In his workshop, he has a mirror in which he can devise the movements of the puppets, the reflections being what the audience will see.
SOME of his puppets have tiny motors within them so that, as he manipulates parts of their body, other parts can appear to move independently. His next show includes a small organ no bigger than two Yellow Pages directories. It is perfectly fashioned and the music that comes from it, specially written for it, manages to be both eerie and jaunty at the same time, the sort of disturbing mix by which Mottram seems intrigued.
Dawkins, in his book, says that if we are puppets, at least we can try to understand our strings; perhaps, in his darker moments, that is what Mottram is trying to do. It is no small irony that in the street in which he lives, there is a house with the replica of a 10-foot shark sticking out of its roof. Installed by an eccentric American who dislikes conformity, the shark is a potent symbol that individualism is not dead, that people are fighting back against the selfish gene. That should give some comfort to the puppet master.
The Seed Carriers is at The Lambert Theatre, Monkstown, Co Dublin, tonight, tomorrow and Thursday at 8 p.m. u7. u5.50. This show is not suitable for children. The International Puppet Festival continues until Sunday
