It is unnerving to be taken backstage after a show only to find yourself stepping over the inert, dismembered bodies of characters you’ve just seen in action. But this is Plexus Polaire, a French-Norwegian company that specialises in puppet theatre, and these players are just wood, foam and papier-mache. Yet their eerie fascination feels no less potent offstage than on, in the large-scale production of Moby Dick by the company’s founder and director, Yngvild Aspeli, based on Herman Melville’s novel.
“Puppetry is like a ouija board,” she tells me later, on a video call from the arctic village of Stamsund, Norway, where she also directs Nordland Visual Theatre. “Even if you know someone is moving the glass, you still have that doubt: maybe it is moving by itself. The puppet is an object, but it is also a medium that can give access to what is invisible, to the other side of appearances. This is a theme that comes back in all of my shows.”
