ABSTRACT
If The Mask borrows its narrative strategies from Commedia-like notions of presentation and theatricality, in a scheme that creates a stage-like quality throughout its pages, then those pages are inhabited by equally theatrical and elusive ‘characters’: puppets. The Mask is literally peopled by puppets in all forms and from all possible backgrounds. Javanese and middle-eastern shadow puppets, Burattini, Bunraku, Punch and Judy and fully-mechanised marionettes all feature. Their presentation is at the same time historical – which, like the studies in the Commedia dell’Arte, is a case of scholarly pioneering – and aesthetic. Puppets appear both as part of a glorious theatrical tradition and as a proposal for the theatre of the future. Like most Craigian obsessions, puppetry is presented in extremis. The puppet is not only seen as the perfect substitute for the living form on stage, contributing to a theory of acting, but it is presented as the ultimate art form itself. If theatre was to be the total art form, then the puppet would represent the total and absolute artifice. Indeed in the meta-theatrical drama which is being enacted throughout the pages of The Mask the puppet definitely surfaces as the visible protagonist. (Craig himself, of course, is the invisible Uberprotagonist). To the idealized Romantic legacy on puppets that Craig inherits from Kleist, Maeterlinck and Oscar Wilde, he adds his very meticulous and pragmatic study conducted through The Mask. From using puppets as a metaphor of the artifice he shifts to presenting very detailed accounts of their origins and history. Like most of the projects undertaken by Craig a process of Romantic ‘othering’ is constantly undermined by an equally strong process of Modernist ‘demythicizing’.
