A Trip Into the Dark Heart of Childhood

Long before “Being John Malkovich” made puppetry chic, Michael Morris was trying to come up with a tagline for his show “Shockheaded Peter,” a quirky piece of theater set in the style of a low-tech Victorian sideshow, with three actors, a bunch of ragged puppets and music by the cult band the Tiger Lillies. Inspired by the 19th century book of cautionary tales for naughty children, his self-titled “junk opera with live animation and big hair”--a nonsensical catch phrase that avoided the P-word--opened at West Yorkshire Playhouse in 1998. It was expected to fulfill a six-week British tour.

But by the time it made its way to London, the show had picked up a frenzied momentum, surprising everyone except, perhaps, the audience. Comparisons to “The Simpsons,” Edward Gorey, Tim Burton and Roald Dahl began to crop up. Even the critics put down their poison pens to give it a double thumbs-up. The Evening Standard called it “wonderfully horrid . . . darkly funny, ravishingly inventive”; the Guardian called the show “very, very nasty, but oh so nice.”

Since then, the show, which opens Thursday in Westwood, has traveled to Germany--where a German-language production is underway--and as far as Hong Kong and Australia. Last fall, the show won over New York.

Not every child knows the story of the boy with the sky-high spiked hair and the long-as-coat-hangers fingernails, who is said to have been the inspiration for Edward Scissorhands. “Struwwelpeter” was published in 1845 by German psychiatrist Dr. Heinrich Hoffman, who wrote it after he could not find a suitable picture-book for his young son. The book has since been translated into many languages--including a version by Mark Twain.

This is no ordinary children’s book. In the pages of “Struwwelpeter,” Conrad’s thumb-sucking indiscretion is punished by cutting off the offending digits. Harriet plays with matches and burns to death in the process. Little Kaspar expires from failing to eat his soup.

Martyn Jacques of the Tiger Lillies adapted the book into lyrics, tightening the meter of the lines, altering some of the story points and--most important--upping the death count.

“It’s like the Tiger Lillies--there’s a lot of humor in it, but it’s also quite nasty and black,” says Jacques. “ ‘Shockheaded Peter’ is already pretty black, and some of them die anyway. It seemed to be a funny idea to have a lot of death in it.”

In Jacques’ version, when Conrad’s thumbs are snipped off, he bleeds to death. Fidgety Phil doesn’t just fall out of his chair at the dinner table, the knives and forks kill him. And in the “Story of the Man That Went Out Shooting,” says Jacques, “there’s a massacre in my version, whereas in the original I think he just falls down a well.”

Turning all this macabre blood and death into a piece of theater was another challenge. Morris hired director Phelim McDermott and designer Julian Crouch, a London-based team that often switches and shares roles in the process of collaboration. The team has since joined with Lee Simpson to form Improbable Theatre. And on a recent afternoon in a rehearsal room in the East End neighborhood of Bethnal Green, they invited a reporter to early rehearsals for their upcoming show, “Spirit,” about what survives even in conflicts such as war.

A half-dozen people sit in folding chairs and cross-legged on the floor. On a wooden approximation of a hillside in front of them, tilted at a 45-degree angle with a trapdoor, McDermott, 36, wears a mask that dwarfs his modestly proportioned body.

“What keeps your boots where they are?” asks another man, standing beside him. “The hill,” the masked man answers.

The group begins to roar. Stepping into this scene feels like stumbling into the middle of a foreign film without any subtitles. You sense the mood, but you can’t quite catch the plot.

“We kind of follow our instincts, and we try not to question too much,” says Crouch, 37, after the rehearsal. “It’s an instinctive process, not an intellectual process. A lot of what works in the show came from accidents. “

To get that process going, Crouch says, “we’ll try almost anything.”

Today, it’s a giant head mask. “You put a mask on someone, and in a sense you’re fooling that person out of their own heads into someone else,” Crouch says, “trying to get your work from a deeper place. “

Crouch and McDermott admit it wasn’t easy to get the ball rolling on “Shockheaded Peter.” They were used to developing their material from scratch and were puzzled by how to take the Tiger Lillies songs and build a show around them. They anguished over hiring professional puppeteers to illustrate the songs, since their work with puppets was self-taught.

Eventually, they did what they always had done. They assembled a few kindred spirits--in this case, actors Tamzin Griffin, Julian Bleach and Anthony Cairns--and began to play around with the material.

“It’s very rare to find a director who gives a company so much freedom and power and trust,” says Bleach, who plays the Victorian actor-manager who narrates the show.

They began working without a script, “devising and improvising and uncovering material that seemed to already be there,” says Griffin, who plays Shockheaded Peter’s mother, as well as a host of other characters.

Together, they realized that the stories all focused on the children, that the parents were curiously absent. So they improvised a story of the perfect couple that want the perfect baby but get Shockheaded Peter instead. The couple bury the odd child under the floorboards--and suffer the consequences. They created the narrator, who is in charge of holding the whole show together in the tradition of a Victorian actor-manager.

“The visual atmosphere--the long nails and the messy hair--appealed to us on a kind of gut level; like classic Grimm’s fairy tales, they press some ancient buttons,” Crouch says.

The show didn’t really come together until the eleventh hour. “On the whole, we unnerve the people we work for,” McDermott says.

“ ‘Shockheaded Peter’ in rehearsal had very little going for it,” Morris says. “I remember taking our publicity agent to a rehearsal, and he was absolutely horrified. You just have to trust that something’s going to come out of the chaos.”

“It was a bit like an explosion in reverse,” says Bleach. “They had all these dissipated ideas. Then in the last two days before it opened, it [came together]. But the first time we did it, it took 2 1/2 hours, and we all had pieces of paper stuck in our bloomers with instructions about which doors to come through.”

The show is now a leaner 90 minutes. “It’s gotten confident but, hopefully, not too slick,” Bleach says. “Now, we know what door we’re coming through. Now we can think about other things.”

That free-spirited work process, which for Crouch and McDermott is just business as usual, is largely responsible for the creature that “Shockheaded Peter” has become.

As much as it might be about children and parents, individuality and conformity, punishment and redemption, it is also about the theater--with its use of puppetry, its old-fashioned, visibly low-budget cardboard cutout scenery and mechanics, its wholehearted melodramatic acting style. “I think we made a decision that we would go for that totally,” says Crouch. “There wasn’t much money, and we were only gonna do it for six weeks.

“We created the master of ceremonies who holds the show together like an old-fashioned actor-manager who wants to play every single part and designs the scenery and he wants it to be a fantastic show,” Crouch says.

“It’s sort of a story of failure. He wants this to be the best show in the world, and it’s not quite. And I think the audience really relates to that, because they’ve sat through an awful lot of shows that haven’t quite got there.”

One night when Jacques forgot the words to a song and walked off the stage, Bleach as the actor-manager ran out to fill in the blanks with an impromptu speech from Richard III. “The audience knew exactly what was happening,” says Crouch. They left it in.

Those kind of mistakes are encouraged and account for what Crouch and McDermott believe is some of the magic of the show. “The performers own it,” Crouch says, “and they continue to work on it and change it--they feel able to do that--and we’ve always encouraged that.”

Morris wanted a show that would appeal to all ages and says it works best with a mixed audience of unsuspecting children and adults who sometimes come clutching their childhood books. Although he wanted something that he could take his kids--who were then 7 and 10--to see, he says that it’s not a children’s show any more than “The Simpsons.”

“Kids watch it and enjoy it for what it is,” says McDermott, “but adults watch it for all the references and the other levels.”

Bleach says he prefers an adult audience, “because they see the irony of it, and they enjoy the fact that they’re laughing at things they really shouldn’t be laughing at, like a girl burning to death.”

Children, he says, are too jaded by computer-generated images to be impressed by the primitive stage effects.

But Crouch believes that the use of puppets forces children to engage their imaginations, making it scary where it might seem silly, such as when Conrad the puppet bleeds to death via a long, flowing red scarf. “If you see an actor and blood is coming out of his fingers,” says Crouch, “the audience is thinking, ‘How did they do that?’ When you watch actors trying to do sex on stage, you’re too busy wondering about their underpants, and what it was like rehearsing that. When you watch a puppet, you just sort of accept, ‘Oh the puppets are having sex now.’ It cuts straight through to the dreaming part.”

Another Improbable Theatre project, Keith Johnstone’s “Lifegame,” is a totally improvised, puppet-free show in which an audience member is interviewed and scenes from his or her life are acted out onstage (it’s playing at the La Jolla Playhouse June 6 to July 9). In the meantime, Crouch and McDermott are negotiating on a film version of “Shockheaded Peter” for Britain’s Channel 4.

But they admit they think this puppet trend has gone far enough. “Now we’re kind of declaring war on the puppets,” they say, half-joking. For “Spirit,” which they hope to bring to UCLA at some point, they joke, “in this show about conflict and war, we might have to kill off all the puppets. You want to stay one step ahead.”

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“SHOCKHEADED PETER,” Freud Playhouse, UCLA. Dates: Tuesdays-Fridays 8 p.m., Saturdays 5 and 10 p.m., Sundays 8 p.m. Ends May 28.

Prices: $35, $15 for full-time UCLA students. Phone: (310) 825-2101.