Maia Kirkman-Richards on designing puppets for Mrs Armitage on Wheels
This spring Mrs Armitage on Wheels takes to the stage at the Southbank Centre as part of the Imagine Festival. This brand-new family show is a musical adaptation of the award-winning BBC animated series Quentin Blake’s Box of Treasures, and is filled with storytelling, music and puppetry. We were delighted to chat with puppet designer Maia Kirkman-Richards about creating characters for the production.
Hi Maia. Thanks very much for talking to us about this fun new show. So, what is the general story of Mrs Armitage on Wheels?
Hiya, it’s an absolute pleasure to get to chat about the show – I’m very excited about it! Well I’d say the production centres around our confidently creative and wonderfully unique hero, Mrs Armitage. She’s a bit of an inventor and is constantly turning other people’s unwanted junk into fantastical treasure. Alongside her trusty canine companion (Breakspear) she sets off on a bike journey that ends up becoming both a literal and spiritual journey of discovery. You can definitely expect lots of inventions, plenty of puppetry and some brilliant original music.
Both Quentin Blake’s book and the animated TV series feature his completely iconic style. Does this bring a lot of pressure to your design process?
Quentin Blake is one of those illustrators where a single squiggle is instantly recognisable, and I’ve been lucky enough to grow up staring at his illustrations… so maybe I should be feeling the pressure! Ha!
But honestly, his work is just so playful and full of energy that I’ve been too busy enjoying my creation process to feel any sense of worry… very Mrs Armitage of me now that I think about it. I’ve loved looking at all of Quentin’s expressive lines and how the characters shift slightly from page to page, so my process has been all about chasing that energy and finding ways to suggest boundless energy and movement in inanimate objects. His illustrations are like a very enthusiastic invitation to be scruffy, bold, playful and a bit ridiculous – and I love that.
You have a wonderfully distinctive creative style yourself that often integrates materials and objects into your puppets which reflect or are featured in the story. Did you go full on Mrs Armitage here, adding items?
Ha ha – yes it does feel like a real invitation for a meeting of worlds doesn’t it? The puppetry within the show is quite varied – you’ll definitely see some object manipulation and watch Mrs Armitage’s inventions come to life in real time, but you’ll also see some puppetry in a more traditional sense. I always feel quite a big sense of responsibility when turning characters from children’s books into puppets for the stage. It feels really important to me that young audiences are able to clearly recognise their favourite characters from the book, so I’d say Breakspear feels more traditional in that sense.
It’s a very auditory book, so were you able to integrate any of that into the show?
There’s definitely a lot of scope for soundscapes within the world of Mrs Armitage’s shed and our composer Jessie has done an incredible job of being very playful with words, sounds and lyrics. We have a very silly song about horns within the show and are currently exploring some word play around that, including object animal puppets with horns… so watch this space! There’s just so much cross over between all departments, which feels very exciting for me.
Tell us about the cast and their puppeteering challenges.
We’ve got such a brilliant cast, I feel very, very lucky. And that’s just as well because they’re all essentially doing multiple jobs at once: acting, puppeteering, singing and occasionally wrestling a bicycle with a never ending list of accessories.
The big challenge is coordination – timing all those moving parts and balancing the stage so that Mrs Armitage, her bike, Breakspear and the world around her feel like one cohesive world. It’s hugely demanding on focus and stamina, but we have a great team who handle it with a lot of skill and a healthy sense of humour, which is all you can ask for. I’ve actually worked with Thomas Walton (who plays Breakspear) before and I’m convinced that there’s not a single challenge that you can give him that he wouldn’t rise to, which makes me feel like my puppets are in very safe hands… literally!
You’ve worked many times at the intimate Little Angel Theatre (who have developed the show in association with Eagle Eye), but it’s quite a different thing creating puppets for a big stage like that at the Southbank. Is it challenging to scale up your designs to fill this space?
It’s a lovely challenge to have isn’t it? I find that no matter the size of the venue, where puppetry is concerned it’s always a game of sightlines. The puppets in this show are on the smaller side (a dog and some hedgehogs) so I’ve been working alongside Ryan [Dawson Laight] (our set designer) to find spaces within the set that are higher up for the puppets to perform on. We’ve also been looking at colours and making sure that the puppets will pop against their backdrops. As for Breakspear, I’m confident that he’s got such a lovely energy about him that although he’s small, his bold character and presence will definitely fill that lovely big stage at the Southbank. It’s really about finding the sweet spot where the puppet feels huge in personality, not just in size.
And finally, which of the characters from the show is your favourite?
I probably shouldn’t play favourites, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit my love for Breakspear. Having grown up surrounded by cats, I’ve never actually been much of a dog person… but my opinion has been massively swayed over the last couple of years. I’ve discovered that I really love creating dog puppets. They are so wonderfully expressive whilst maintaining such simplicity, with just the tilt of a head or the wag of a tail you know exactly what they’re thinking… consider me a convert (just don’t tell that to my cat Mousse!)
Thanks very much to Maia for telling us about this exciting new production.
Mrs Armitage on Wheels is aimed at ages 3-8 years and speeds into the Southbank Centre from Wednesday 18 – Saturday 21 February as part of the Imagine festival.
