Long before actors had a stage of their own, carved figures were already speaking for the gods, and four thousand years later they still know how to make us cry.

Every art form has its embarrassing relatives, and for the theatre that relative has long been the puppet. It sits at the children’s party and the seaside booth, all bright felt and squeaky voices, and it is easy to forget that it is in fact the older branch of the family. Articulated figures were performing in temples and marketplaces long before anything we would recognize as drama existed, and in many cultures the puppet stage, not the human one, has been the keeper of a people’s epics, saints and jokes. The history of puppetry is really a history of a single strange bargain, renewed in every century and on every continent: the audience agrees to treat an object as a person, and in exchange the object is permitted to say and do things no person could. Kings have been mocked, gods embodied and wars mourned through figures of wood, leather and cloth precisely because everyone present could insist, if pressed, that it was only a doll.

Older than the theatre itself

The oldest surviving evidence comes from the ancient Mediterranean. Egyptian tombs have yielded small wooden figures with movable jaws and limbs, some operated by strings or wires, dating back to around 2000 BCE, and the Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, described Egyptian women at religious festivals carrying statuettes with movable parts worked by cords. Whether these figures were toys, ritual instruments or performers in some early entertainment is impossible to say with certainty, and that ambiguity is itself the point. At its origin the puppet is inseparable from the idol, the effigy and the votive figure. An object made in the image of a living being, then made to move, sat naturally at the boundary between worship and show.

The Greeks had a word for such figures, neurospasta, meaning things pulled by strings, and they clearly enjoyed them as entertainment as well as ritual. Xenophon’s Symposium, set in Athens in 422 BCE, records a puppeteer from Syracuse performing at a private banquet, and later writers mention marionette showmen who were granted the use of the great stone theatres, a detail that suggests both the popularity of the form and a certain aristocratic sniffiness about it. Aristotle reached for the marionette as a metaphor for the human being moved by internal strings, beginning a long philosophical tradition in which the puppet stands for the question of who, exactly, is in control. From the very beginning, then, the form carried its double character: a fairground amusement in one hand, a theological instrument in the other.

Shadow and string: the great traditions of Asia

If Europe kept the puppet at the edge of its official culture, much of Asia placed it at the centre. Nowhere is that clearer than in Indonesia, where the shadow theatre known as wayang kulit remains one of the world’s great performing arts. A dalang, the solo master puppeteer, sits for an entire night behind a white screen lit by a lamp, manipulating flat figures of intricately perforated and painted buffalo hide while narrating episodes from the Mahabharata and Ramayana, cueing a gamelan orchestra and improvising topical comedy, all without a break. The dalang is at once storyteller, priest, conductor and satirist, and the finest of them are national figures. UNESCO proclaimed Indonesian wayang a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2003, one of several puppet traditions the organization has singled out for protection, a quiet acknowledgement that some of humanity’s most sophisticated theatre has always happened behind a cotton screen.

China tells its own founding story about the shadow theatre. According to a much loved legend, an emperor of the Han dynasty, inconsolable after the death of his favourite concubine, was comforted by a court occultist who conjured her silhouette moving behind a lit curtain. Whatever its true origins, Chinese shadow puppetry grew into a vast family of regional styles, with translucent figures cut from donkey or ox hide, jointed at the neck, shoulders and waist, performing operas, histories and ghost stories to the accompaniment of singing and strings. It too now carries UNESCO recognition, inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2011. India, which may well be the ultimate source of the whole shadow tradition, sustains a remarkable range of forms of its own, from the large translucent leather figures of tholu bommalata in Andhra Pradesh to the string marionettes of Rajasthan, whose kathputli puppeteers trace their craft through family lines said to run back a thousand years.

Japan raised puppetry to a refinement no other culture has quite matched. Bunraku, more formally ningyo johruri, took shape in the pleasure quarters of Osaka in the seventeenth century and reached its classic form in the eighteenth. Each principal puppet, roughly half life size, is operated by three puppeteers who work in full view of the audience: the master controls the head and right arm, a second operator the left arm, a third the feet. To one side, a chanter voices every character while a musician on the three stringed shamisen drives the emotion. Apprenticeships traditionally run for decades, and the greatest playwright of the form, Chikamatsu Monzaemon, wrote tragedies of doomed lovers for puppets that are ranked with anything composed for human actors anywhere. UNESCO proclaimed Bunraku a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2003 and inscribed it on the Representative List in 2008. Audiences report that within minutes the three visible operators seem to vanish, leaving only the small figure, breathing and grieving, alone in the light.

Karagöz and the Ottoman shadow

The Islamic world, often wary of figurative representation, made a grand exception for the shadow screen, where the image is only ever a fleeting silhouette. The most celebrated result is Karagöz, the Turkish shadow theatre named for its hero, a blunt, earthy everyman with a black eye and a quick fist, forever sparring with his pretentious neighbour Hacivat. The figures, cut from translucent camel or ox hide, oiled until they glow, and painted in brilliant colours, are pressed against a lit screen by a single master performer who voices every character, from gossiping neighbours to drunken dandies, in a whirl of dialects and songs. For centuries Karagöz was the entertainment of Ramadan nights in coffeehouses across the Ottoman lands, and its cheerful vulgarity gave ordinary people a licensed voice against authority. Related traditions took root from Greece to North Africa, and Turkey’s Karagöz was inscribed by UNESCO on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009.

Strings, fists and swords: the European traditions

Europe’s word for the string puppet, marionette, is usually traced to little Mary, a reminder that the medieval church used moving figures of the Virgin and the saints in its festivals long before the form turned profane. By the early modern period puppet troupes were a fixture of fairs and market squares, and out of the Italian commedia dell’arte came the hook nosed, squawking Pulcinella, who crossed borders and changed names as he went. The English got their version early and precisely: on 9 May 1662 the diarist Samuel Pepys recorded seeing an Italian puppet play in Covent Garden, the first documented appearance in England of the character who would become Mr Punch. That date is still celebrated as Punch’s official birthday. In the nineteenth century Punch moved from marionette to glove puppet, acquired his wife Judy, his baby, his dog and his crocodile, and settled into the striped seaside booth where, swazzle voiced and gleefully violent, he has been beating the Devil ever since.

Sicily built something grander. The opera dei pupi, which flourished in Palermo and Catania from the early nineteenth century, stages the chivalric epics of Charlemagne’s knights with rod marionettes of astonishing weight, armoured in beaten metal, that clash swords, lose heads and are cut theatrically in half, night after night, through story cycles that could run for a year. In 2001 UNESCO chose the opera dei pupi among the very first Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, and it was inscribed on the Representative List in 2008. Further north, the Czech lands developed perhaps Europe’s deepest marionette culture. Itinerant puppeteers kept the Czech language alive on their little stages through centuries of German speaking rule, national heroes such as the comic duo Spejbl and Hurvínek emerged from the workshop of Josef Skupa in the twentieth century, and puppetry in the Czech Republic and Slovakia was inscribed by UNESCO in 2016. It was also a German, Heinrich von Kleist, who in 1810 wrote the form’s strangest love letter, an essay arguing that the marionette, free of self consciousness, possesses a grace no human dancer can reach.

The puppet meets the camera

Television might have killed the puppet booth. Instead it handed puppetry the largest audiences in its history. In the United States the new medium’s first genuine craze was a marionette: Howdy Doody, the freckled cowboy who debuted on NBC in 1947 and presided over American childhood for more than a decade. But the transformative figure was Jim Henson, who began performing on local Washington television in the mid 1950s and understood, sooner than anyone, that the camera changed the rules. The frame itself became the puppet stage, the operator could simply stand below the shot, and a monitor let the puppeteer see exactly what the audience saw. Henson’s soft, flexible creations, built for the close up rather than the balcony, could achieve a subtlety of expression no carved head ever managed, and with performers like Frank Oz he gave them comic timing to match.

When Sesame Street arrived in 1969, Henson’s Muppets became teachers to the world. The show’s international co-productions eventually reached well over a hundred countries, each with locally built characters speaking local languages, which makes it a fair claim that the Muppet is the most widely travelled puppet form ever devised. The Muppet Show, launched in 1976, went further and made the puppets stars in their own right, hosting human celebrities who happily played second fiddle to a frog. A generation raised on Kermit, Big Bird and Miss Piggy absorbed, without ever thinking about it, the ancient premise of wayang and Bunraku: that a manufactured creature, honestly presented as such, can be more vivid company than most people.

The stage takes its puppets back

By the 1990s the live theatre, needing to offer what screens could not, rediscovered what it had lent to television. Julie Taymor’s staging of The Lion King, which opened on Broadway in 1997, put masks, rod puppets and shadow figures drawn from African, Asian and European traditions at the heart of the biggest commercial spectacle of its era, and made no attempt to hide the human performers inside the antelopes and under the giraffe stilts. The exposure was the enchantment. A decade later, in 2007, the National Theatre in London staged War Horse with life size horse puppets of cane, gauze and steel built by South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company. Each horse is brought to life by three visible puppeteers, an echo of Bunraku that its makers happily acknowledge, and the animals breathe, flick their ears and tremble with such conviction that audiences around the world have wept over the fate of a creature they could see straight through.

Handspring’s workshop also helped create the era’s most extraordinary piece of puppet theatre, one with no theatre at all. In 2021 Little Amal, a puppet of a ten year old Syrian refugee girl standing about twelve feet tall, walked some five thousand miles from the Turkish border region near Syria across Europe to Manchester, in a rolling public artwork called The Walk. Operated by a rotating team of puppeteers, greeted in some towns with festivals and in a few with hostility, she has since travelled far beyond that first journey, crossing the United States and appearing before millions. Amal carries no script and speaks no lines. She simply arrives, enormous and childlike, and crowds reach up to touch her hand. It is the oldest use of the form imaginable, the effigy that walks through the community bearing its meaning, returned to the streets in the twenty first century.

Why we still weep for wood and cloth

Run the story end to end, from the jointed figures of Egyptian tombs to a giant girl walking across continents, and the constant is not the material or the mechanism but the peculiar quality of the audience’s belief. No one watching Bunraku thinks the puppet is alive. Everyone can see the three men in black; everyone at War Horse can see the cane ribs and the puppeteers’ legs. The emotion arrives not despite that knowledge but because of it. Watching a puppet, we witness life being granted from moment to moment, breath by borrowed breath, and some part of us understands that this is also our own situation. The puppet is animated exactly as long as someone attends to it, and not a second longer, which may be why its small deaths on stage land so hard.

Scholars of the form like to say that the puppet is the only actor who never pretends. It has no ego to protect, no career to manage and no self to get in the way of the role, which is what Kleist meant about its grace. Whatever names the next century gives its figures, digital, mechanical or stitched from cloth as always, the bargain struck in those temple courtyards four thousand years ago will still hold. We hand an object our capacity for belief, and it hands us back an image of ourselves, moved by strings we cannot see, and briefly, astonishingly, alive.