I HAVE always been frightened of puppets. There is no shame in it. Anyone with a nodule of imagination in all that grey matter - anyone, in fact who is not a puppet masquerading as a person - believes that a well manipulated puppet has a soul. And there is something terrifying about the idea of the inanimate things coming to life. If we can't draw a firm line between what is animate and what is inanimate, where do we end up?
And yet it is such a thrill for artists - and with puppets, you are talking of visual artists as well as performance artists - to blur that line. And it is a thrill for audiences to dance over the line for the space of a show, only to go back to the safety of a world where animals breathe and things do not, at curtain down.
This thrill has been largely denied to Irish audiences down the years, while a puppet tradition thrives all over the world, particularly in Russia and Eastern Europe. Alright, alright, you will mention the Thunderbirds, Zig and Zag, and Wanderly Wagon, but puppets on TV are not the same thing. Judge the dog will prove this in, well, person, at the fourth International Puppet Festival in Dun Laoghaire from next Friday.
Though his furry snout is pictured large in the programme, he will only be used as a warm up for the Lambert Puppet Theatre's own rod puppet show, Cinderella. People who are, not to put too fine a point on it, past the first flush to youth and remember Wanderly Wagon, will recall Judge, and he forms a link between them and their children: "It's still the same Judge, but he has developed a stronger character," says Eugene Lambert his creator and the director of the puppet festival.
This homespun delight will feature among a wonderful array of puppet types. Feike Boschma from the Netherlands will do a version of Tristan and Isolde, using marionettes, fabric and other objects, and combining visible with invisible puppeteering. Bambalina Titelles from Spain will do a show based on Hieronymus Bosch's triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, using "rod puppets, shadows, shapes and atmosphere". The Harlequin Marionette Theatre will perform in a puppet cabaret, which will also see Eugene Lambert and other puppeteers on stage. These shows are for adults and older children, but Mind The Baby with Monster and Frog, performed by Open Hand from England, is among the shows for children, and mixes a costume puppet (a person on stage) with glove puppets.
Other events include a shadow workshop, a junk puppet workshop, and a mask and movement workshop, as well as an open air show on Sunday week on the East Pier in Dun Laoghaire.