The puppetry renaissance

Advance ticket sales for My Neighbour Totoro, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s current production running till mid-January, beat all Barbican box-office records. I went on a rainy weekday evening last month, and the place was heaving with Hayao Miyazaki fans of all ages, lots of them clutching furry Totoros they’d bought in the theatre shop.

 It’s an impressive, dreamlike production, set in rural Japan after the second world war, and another triumph for the art of puppetry. Totoro himself is huge and cuddly, with an enormous round tummy and inane grin when he bares his teeth. There’s a whole puppeteer inside his pink tongue, as well as three or four more inside his body, which gives you a sense of the scale of him. Among the other puppets, including insects, hens and a smiling goat, is a vast yellow inflatable cat-bus, wafted round the stage by black-clad puppeteers in beekeeper veils who scuttle alongside the human actors.