Guest Blog: Ben Glasstone on How Puppets Saved his Career and His New Show THE KING OF NOTHING

Puppets are for kids, right? Well, in one sense, yes. Because kids have intense and untamed imaginations. When they see a painted piece of polystyrene talk and fly (and sing) they are utterly transported. We grown-ups less so. Or maybe...just maybe...we might find that the very unreality of puppetry, its direct appeal to our most primal imaginative capacities, short-circuits our humdrum expectations and allows us to return, for a brief hour, to that realm of wild belief.

If that sounds like a tall order for a fringe puppet show, stick with me. I am ready to lure you into the world of puppetry with the zeal of the true convert - after, all I owe my career to it.

For some reason, I got it into my head at an early age that I wanted to write musicals (I think it was my parents singing me Cole Porter songs in infancy) and, with the benefit of hindsight, I can see that this was asking for trouble.

It started off innocently enough, when, with the irrepressible self-confidence known only to college students, I took my first show to the Edinburgh Fringe and boldly attempted to reinvent musical theatre as a vehicle for surreal sci-fi. But as I began making my way (slowly) as a London-based musician and theatre maker, it soon became clear that the world might not yet be ready for my vast and whimsical visions.

The breakthrough came when I was developing my latest wheeze for creating a "classic musical" that could be both original and yet familiar enough to attract a producer and an audience - a show inspired by Aesop's fables.

While trying to find the right theatrical language to bring a world of canny animals to life, I was recommended a puppetry director called Steve Tiplady and went along to see his version of Jonah and the Whale, playing at the "home of British Puppetry," London's Little Angel Theatre.

In the middle of that charming two-hander, Steve did something that blew my tiny theatre mind: a full-on musical production number (something about the sins of the people of Nineveh) with chorus lines entirely composed of cutlery. Knives and forks dancing in perfect choreographic complicity while the performers rattled off a pin-sharp patter-song. Ah, I thought. Maybe I can make musicals after all...

Soon after that, Steve and I worked together at Little Angel on that Aesop-inspired show and, with an intoxicating mix of live musicians, puppets and shadows, created a much loved family musical The Mouse Queen, that went on to run off-West End and across the pond at the New Victory in New York. Thus was born (in my mind, at least) the Puppet Musical. A bit like a musical, but smaller.

Nearly 20 years on from my Damascus moment watching spoons shuffle, I have helped compose, write and direct innumerable Puppet Musicals with Little Angel and others, and in 2012 I set up Monstro Theatre, the self-styled "Pioneers of the Puppet Musical," a company dedicated to this somewhat niche art-form.

Our new co-production with Little Angel, The King of Nothing, is an anarchic take on The Emperor's New Clothes and, as a true puppet musical should, it absolutely revels in its limitations. I've always loved the Hans Christian Andersen story: it is relevant to everyone and every age, because people will always be vain, gullible and deluded.

If that sounds a bit cynical, here's the flip side: people will always be imaginative. Every time we watch Netflix, stroke our phones or go to a show, we allow ourselves to believe things that aren't true. For me, what's special about theatre - and puppetry in particular - is that it is so much more obvious (and healthy) that what we are sharing in is made-up and put-on: it is wilful collusion.

So in Monstro's version of The Emperor's New Clothes we delight in the unreality of the performance: the first thing that The King of Nothing's two performers do is announce their credentials: "We're Swindlers," they sing. "Don't believe a word we say." It's basically a couple of clowns and some daft puppets monkeying with the audience, and - in true Monstro spirit - equally suitable for 7-year old true believers and puppet-curious adults.

Over the years - thanks, in part, to my adventures in puppetry - I have occasionally even managed to get a few of the more unwieldy sort of musicals onto stages (the ones involving costly quantities of actual human beings). But I try not to take these too seriously. The Big Time is capricious. My mantra: dream small and dream free.

The King Of Nothing runs at The Little Angel Theatre from 24 September - 20 November

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