The Cleansing of Constance Brown is performing it’s Deutschlandpremiere here at the Mainzer Kammerspiele as part of the ‘No Strings Attached’ puppet theatre Festival. This may seem strange, given there are no puppets (lest you count the team’s deft manipulation of the Orange Billowing Mass – the animate bag of air which swallows stage and occupants, Blob-like, half-way through the show) but Germany has a much more progressive reading of ‘puppet-theatre’, as we found out 3 years ago when the Rice Show was booked for the acclaimed FIDENA programme in Bochum. Over here ‘figurentheater’ covers a multitude of progressive interpretations including ‘Object Theater’ and Mask work. In the context of FIDENA, the Rice made new sense – the 80 million grains (population of Germany) becoming a huge cast, animating the purpose of each statistic.

Today was get-in day for Constance Brown, and an opportunity to rehearse in our newest recruit, Fiona, who is the latest (and third) Bernadette. On the strength of her short-time studying the dvd, reading Bernadette’s notes and chatting to James, she seemed totally tuned in and conversant with the material, putting some of us to shame as we stumbled round the set, trying to re-patch our memories of the last version.