The Dragon King was performed at the Ferst Centre by Tanglewood Marionettes. If you can’t tell, they do marionettes! (Ah duh! ) We see onstage a small rostrum, with curtains either side, and a backdrop upstage - the backdrop is split in three, with a introductory panel (The Dragon King painted on with a red background) in the middle and black either side. Small lights are situated at the top of stage left and stage right of the frame that holds everything up.

The show is introduced, and we are immediately told that this is a performance where we get to watch the puppeteers whilst they’re working the marionettes from above. (A la Lonely Goatherd) 

The story is thus: a grandmother in China is lamenting that the Dragon King (a godly dragon who controls the seas and rain) has failed her family because there has been no rain and the crops haven’t grown. The king has been hiding and she decides to go find him and convince him to help. Along the way, she makes friends with a magical fish, who grants her a wish (the storyline is more complicated than this and I’m leaving out characters/scenes that aren’t entirely significant to understanding the plot). The grandmother knows that the king is hiding in the ocean, so she asks to breath underwater. Whilst in the ocean, she meets various characters, including a lonely giant squid, and a very cute crab. She discovers that the king is mourning over the loss of his pearl, a magical item that allows him to bring rain; so she finds the pearl and returns it to him.

Although this sounds like a very child-oriented performance - and it is - adults can enjoy it just as much. It’s not dumbed down, somewhat like a puppet version of Finding Nemo. The grandmother and several other creatures are marionettes. Initially, I wasn’t particularly enthralled when the show started. It looked pretty and all, but it was just another marionette performance… and then the hare appeared. The hare (as in tortoise and…) is also a marionette, but the puppeteer moved it slowly as it bounced across the stage; each movement and articulation of the joints could be seen, like watching a slow motion of Wile E Coyote animation. It was here where I realised that this performance was going to be worth watching. The skill in getting such juicy movements out of those strings is true talent.

If yesterday’s performance of Panther & Crane, and today’s performance of El Hombre Ciguena are perfect examples of crappy shows, The Dragon King is an example of flawless performance. There is nothing I could fault Tanglewood for; the script was pared back, with humourous moments dotted around the play. The puppet design was gorgeous, with not just marionettes, but rod puppets (the squid was a person-sized rod puppet) and blacklight puppets. When the grandmother dives deep into the ocean to reach the floor, blue blacklight puppets appear, giving us a sense of the eerie underwater life. The set design too is brilliant: that middle panel in the backdrop is a long (long) canvas, with different backdrops painted on; as one scene finishes the canvas is rotated, and the next backdrop is in place. (Afterwards the company mentioned that it took the designer one year to paint it, and one year for them to practice with it) They rolled the next scene/backdrop in place perfectly each time, something any performer/mechanist would know is almost near impossible. Other set pieces were used to create scenery, such as coral or ocean waves.

The manipulation too was spot on - if they dropped a string, or did something else accidentally, there’s no way anyone in the audience would have knew. In particular, the fluidity achieved when the grandmother is swimming (the marionette’s strings work in a way to make her horizontal, so she looks like she’s swimming) is amazing. You could not help but believe the character was swimming mid-air. … I could go on and on about how brilliant the manipulation was. 

Ultimately The Dragon King is exactly what good puppets and good puppet writing should be: give just enough to tell the story, and then a little more in order to break the wall of expectations. It has a good balance of doing what works, what’s simple and yet looks complicated - and doing it in a way we don’t expect. Even those in the audience, puppeteers all, would ooh and ah at various unexpected effects.

The only thing I had a problem with - and I know I said it was flawless, bare with me here - is that it seemed to have a false ending. The dragon king does appear, and goes into the audience. Unfortunately, this particular audience was so gung-ho, they started clapping their enthusiasm for the appearance and that turned into a standing ovation. Naturally, continuing the show as planned felt a little awkward - at least for me. Not so much the fault of the performers, so much as the audience.

Anyway, this show gets (can you guess?) my highest rating: