sustained theatre

By Kamini Gupta

Theatre designer Kamini Gupta takes us backstage

Stories That Are Just So adapted and directed by Jonathan Petherbridge, London Bubble

Based on Kipling’s Just So stories, this children’s show toured the London Parks.

The design concept was based around the way children play and enact stories by transforming everyday objects in their environment. Using masks, puppets and animating found objects to create the animal characters and props that suggested location. The costumes of different characters were created in the style of the ‘dressing-up box’, adding a tea-cosy hat, wrapping a sarong, or adding a pair of goggles to facilitate transformation.

The Bat puppet was complemented by flying goggles, jacket and scarf, the Crocodile glove puppet was created using a clip purse decorated with button ‘skin’ - it squirted ‘cocodile tears’! And the Fly appeared on the end of a fishing rod. Wild Cat was created using bottle cleaning brushes and dish mops. Wild Dog was made of tin cans with a dish brush tail. The Horse was a pair of ‘ears’, and a colander adorned with baby’s dummies became the Cow.

The basic set was three wooden wardrobes that revealed the characters and created locations - a bath wheeled out of a set of drawers to form the Limpopo river.

About the author

Kamini Gupta