Apples and Ladders

Apples and Ladders is an intimate puppet show that casts long shadows ONCE upon a time there was a piece of wood. From that sentence grew Carlo Collodi's century-old tale of the world's most famous puppet, Pinocchio. It also begins a smaller story; more modern, closer to home and probably less likely to be adapted by Disney. Apples and Ladders was conceived between a piece of wood and a sad and beautiful song in Brunswick around four years ago. "I think I was bored one day so I started carving an old man's head," says puppeteer Jacob Williams. At the time his partner, Sarah Kriegler, was listening to a CD by English Gypsy trio the Tiger Lillies, gutter kings of decadence and despair for squeezebox, twangy strings and falsetto. "Listen to this," she said. "I think this song is this old man's story." So was born the head and heart of George, the faded, alcoholic drag queen at the centre of Apples and Ladders' suburban fable of isolation and redemption. In time appeared George's elderly next-door neighbours, an apple tree standing between their houses, and a foreboding, skeletal figure that Williams and Kriegler refer to as The Knave of Hearts. While none of them are given audible voice, the four small puppets come alive as vividly as Pinocchio under the exquisitely mournful spell of the Tiger Lillies' music — some of which was especially written after a collaboration with the band was struck by email. "In some ways we didn't realise just how dark it was until it was in performance and we found people were really shaken by it," Kriegler says of the show's premiere season at the Malthouse last year. This season will see a reworking, but now with an extension of the storyline and new sound design. "Somebody actually asked us last year, 'How did you make that George character cry?' " she says. In fact, any tears in evidence were the puppeteers' own. That's part of the deal with this style of performance, in which Kriegler and Williams are clearly visible on stage, willing their own emotions into their small wooden characters, while Richard Vabre's lighting design casts giant shadows on the back wall. The obvious visual metaphor — small scenarios with big implications — reflects the nature of the story, says Williams. The seed of it was an anonymous story he read on the wall of an underground train in London, about two old men who lived next door to each other.