many hands make ... work more fun!

The workshop has been buzzing this week as a wonderful team of volunteers paper mached, scrimmed, drilled and sanded their way through a mountain of moomin making, and learned a few handy techniques in the process. A teacher, a theatre designer and two foundation students joined me in the workshop and it was great to see what we achieved between us. Elke and Kaylie , who came for all three puppet making days, really wanted to learn how to make a trigger control for puppet heads, so sure enough the heads for Little My and Salome the Little Creep that we mached on Friday got removed from the moulds and now are able to nod to each other beautifully!

Rowan and Lauren pitched in on Tuesday, paper macheing heads, sanding wooden hands and removing the body of the biggest of the moomintroll puppets from its mould - these puppets will be around 4ft tall in total, so I'm very keen to see how they look when all the parts are put together - and, more importantly, how practical they are for puppeteering. Its going to be important to keep the weight down as much as possible, so the heads and bodies are paper mache, but I think the limbs will be wooden - I'll just have to hollow them out as much as possible. It did feel a lot like the mashed potato scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind when I started to make the body, but somehow ended up looking more like a poor-man's disposable Barbara Hepworth sculpture! Let's hope the audience don't think that, too.

It feels really good to make progress on the show - it's a bit of a stop-start process having to go through the process of approval from Moomin Characters Ltd, the organization who manage Tove's estate, and some of the characters have been made and remade a few different times. When we made Little Leap Forward a few years ago, we based all the masks and puppets on childhood photos that Guo Yue provided for us of his family in China, and whilst Yue and Clare Farrow, his wife and writer, approved the script, they were happy for us to interpret the photos into mask form. I hoped it would be similarly straightforward with the Moomins. The great news thus far is that Hattie's script has been approved, and so has the beautiful set design produced by Tom Rogers. But I am still trying to find a happy meeting place between the needs of a puppet that has to be neutral enough to carry a range of emotions throughout the show, and the requirements of the licensing body. Hopefully the latest crop are closer to what they have in mind.

The Nightingale has also just sang its last song for a while. Here's a review from when it was in London. I saw it just over a week ago in Bath, and Mark and Aya were still putting their all into it. Thank you to both of them, for always making sure that each audience who sees it for the first time gets the same wonderful performance as those at the beginning of the tour. They've been on the road for a long time - I'm sure they will be quite glad to be home again for a while. Hooray!