Category: Puppetry

Teatrino Meccanico will be at Swords Castle this month with a brand new interactive show. River Crossing was created to invite visitors of all ages to physically interact with what’s on the stage and directly influence the stories created there. The mechanical theatre will retain its classic look and feel, including plush deep red theatre curtains, broad stage and trap-door feature in the facade for Mabel the friendly half-feline half-wolf puppet to make her special appearances, but the entire set and main characters will be entirely new for this year’s offering.

Drawing upon old children’s tales and poems, River Crossing features a friendly Owl and Pussy Cat, complete with their pea-green boat and a host of other delightful puppets such as a brightly coloured array of sea-serpents, baby badgers and otters. An entirely new mechanism was purpose-built for the stage to propel the rowing boat from one side of the stage to the other, but unlike in previous shows, this year the wheels and levers for operating the mechanisms will all be facing the front of the stage, in full view of the audience. Instead of hiding the controls away I decided to invite my audience to participate in the wonders of engineering and get stuck in to the action!

River Crossing will be on show at The Festival of Children’s Literature 2026 at Swords Castle on Saturday 26th September. You can find us in the Castle Grounds from 11am till 4pm.

River Crossing will be on show at The Festival of Children’s Literature 2026 at Swords Castle on Saturday 26th September. You can find us in the Castle Grounds from 11am till 4pm.

I am so lucky to be spending my weekend learning about puppetry performance with Fergus J. Walsh, Associate Professor of Puppetry at the University of Connecticut, and several other fascinating people.

Today we learned a few things about communicating with our hands. We were asked to perform a 2 minute story, with a beginning, middle and end with no props. It was so challenging but also such fun!

Tomorrow we will be exploring another kind of puppetry, which I am really excited to try – three-person puppetry! We won’t be covering marionette performance, but I already knew that and am eager to learn other ways to puppeteer! Wolfie might join me anyway just for fun. He’s needs a break from tending to his beloved tree.

Looking back I realise how lucky I have been that members of the community here in Skerries took a chance on me and my puppeteering efforts in the first place! It can be a stressful way to learn, just diving headlong into putting on a show. I feel much more devoted to the practice now that I am learning from a puppeteer and tutor in a supportive group setting, than when I was trying to teach myself by watching videos and practising alone.

What better time to spare a thought for the wild garden birds than Winter Solstice? I took Wolfie out with me to stock up their feeders today. So many birds rely on the added source of food during the long cold months of winter.

Fingal libraries have asked me to describe my “Teatrino Meccanico” and its debut performance “City of Lost Trees”. After scrounging a some discarded cardboard boxes from the streets surrounding my dad’s place and spending a lot of time on the roof cutting, painting and draping fabric to give the impression of curtains, I came up with this image. I drew the cogs digitally and added them to the image to hint at the way the theatre will operate. In the end this image wasn’t used, as the creative director preferred an image with no digital additions, which s fair enough. I also decided that operating the cardboard wolf puppet was not going to work for me, and opted to try building a wolf marionette instead.

Today we experimented with one of several mechanical solutions to making stage props move… by themselves! I presented dad with my suggestion, which was that I felt there must be a way using cogs or cylindrical objects of some sort, for a person to turn a handle in one location, and a large disc in another location would turn. There were a lot of details to be worked out, such as, how much do you want it to turn, and would you be able to turn it back again in the other direction etc. etc. But after a lot of conversations, he had a neat little solution which I immediately realised could work.

It needed to be something I could do by myself when back in Ireland, many miles away from my father and his wonderful engineering skills and even more wonderful workshop.

In bright and colourful surroundings of my hometown during a visit back to Malta. I started work on my latest project. A Mechanical Theatre to replace my old cardboard theatre that has now been retired and a new show called “The City of Lost Trees”.

I needed to get to work without any further ado which meant working while on holiday. Building on the reputation of past puppet shows I have designed, built and performed in my local town of Skerries back in Ireland, I was happy to accept when asked to perform at Fingal’s upcoming Festival of Children’s Literature.

The stage of the previous portable puppet theatre was adequate but there was no room for scenery. A new theatre, custom-made to accommodate a larger stage area was desperately needed, so new designs were drafted within a week of accepting the offer. The idea of creating human-powered moving sets had been niggling at me since my last performance at the Scarecrow Festival. A few sketches and prototypes later and the reality of what could be achieved became ever more appealing.

I combined catching up with my father in Malta with several visits to his workshop. We tinkered, and we wrestled a few possible solutions to the mechanical problems. Finally, we worked something out, but while he continued to tinker in his garage, I would have to start work on the sets right away. There is so much to be done!