I love Judy

What’s the way to do it ?

Staging Judy & Punch, re-viewing puppetry heritage.

March 2021 — London, initiatory journey.On the train from Paris Gare du Nord to London St Pancras, with our two children on our laps and a third on the way, we set off on a new journey. We are a traveling puppeteers’ family. We spent New Year’s Eve in Naples, under a heavy rain of fireworks. We looked everywhere for traces of Pulcinella, which we found in libraries, museums, pizzerias, and santons... Now in London, we are in search of his homologue, Mister Punch. Here, no pizza boxes bearing his likeness, but we find Punch on pub signs, in antique shops, old advertisements, museums, and children’s books. We would love to see puppeteers performing in the street, though they are probably waiting for the warmer season to head to the seaside or play in the squares. We want to understand what Mister Punch embodies today.

During our stay in London, we are hosted at a friend’s place in Marylebone, four adults and three babies in a tiny flat. Our children are both in the thick of their terrible twos, overwhelmed by their emotions, worn out by the London miles. The Punch & Judy repertoire, with its controversial family story where the child eventually ends up in a sausage machine, touches and unsettles us. In our society, there are plenty of tools for being good parents, plenty of reflection and resources. Despite all the efforts, instincts remain part of humanity and statistics continue to expose the taboo of domestic violence.

January 2025 — Charleville-Mézières, International Puppet Center Jacques Félix, research residency.We are preparing an exhibition on the iconography of glove puppet theatre from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century: reading literary sources, searching for images, thinking, writing, and debating. Outside, it is snowing; inside the library, surrounded by piles of books, we take the time to reread J. P. Collier’s 1828 transcription of Piccini’sPunch and Judy. We have been performing with Pulcinella for six years, and Piccini’s show inspires us, resonates, and makes us hungry for more. The first Act, in which Punch strikes and successively disposes of his child and his wife, catches our attention. The subject is urgent — speaking about violence is already a first step toward avoiding or resolving it. Playing the text as written seems too misogynist and too tough, impossible for today’s audiences. But staging ideas are already taking shape. This desire to perform Punch and Judy keeps on growing.C’est parti !

Our Judy and Punch show will grow from the roots of our practice — and those roots are worth a word. Léandre comes from a theatre family and studied classical music. Anastasia has two physician parents and trained at a theatre academy before completing a university master’s degree in puppetry. Since 2018, we have worked exclusively with puppetry and street theatre, performing our shows more than five hundred times across Europe — mostly in public or non-dedicated spaces, for mixed audiences, in eight languages.

Anastasia animates the puppets alone in the booth. She performs standing, with small hand-sized puppets held above her head, the hero’s voice is produced by the swazzle. Léandre stands beside the booth: he talks both to the audience and to the puppets, sings, and plays music. Over time our tools have been refined. Our early wood-clay puppets have been replaced by linden wood sculptures. The new puppet dresses have been shaped to fit Anastasia’s hand and allow maximum manipulation virtuosity; we have moved from a flat, open booth to tower-shaped booths with a roof and back panel. We have learned to make our own swazzles.

How does our practice grow?

The seed was planted in Naples, at a workshop with Bruno Leone that Anastasia attended in 2017. We met on apénichein Paris shortly after and began performing Pulcinella almost by accident — an improvised show at a 30th birthday party that, to our surprise, brought the house down. The soil is our artistic background: rigour, writing, dramaturgy, a love of the audience. The water is the audience itself — it is the audience that tells us this show speaks to them, that pushes us toward greater presence on stage. From a practice that was then unknown to us, yet which the audience kept validating, grows a need to understand, to shed light, to research.

We therefore began a broad investigation into glove puppet theatre: seeing every show we could find, performing as often as possible and in as many different contexts — markets, town squares, schools, village fairs, institutional receptions... We read the books, collected every image we came across on the subject. In the resulting corpus a practice stood out, which is precisely the subject of our exhibition opening in April 2026 in Paris at the Théâtre aux Mains Nues. Regardless of era or country, the puppet shows depicted shared common characteristics:

• A public space. A mixed audience — young and old, rich and poor — the show speaks to all.
• The frame is built of wood and draped in fabric, rising like a covered tower.
• The puppets are small, fitted to the performer’s hand, and emerge from the opening just above their head.
• The audience’s engagement is tied to a kind of virtuosity, and to the primacy of gesture.
• The presence of the bottler — witness, musician, actor, mountebank, or some combination of all these at once.

• Use of the swazzle to make the protagonist’s voice.

The artificial voice produced by the swazzle defines the protagonist: an extra-daily, non-human, uncanny figure. Down the centuries and across Europe, it has taken different names and different costumes. When we perform Pulcinella, everyone identifies with the character — children see a child, girls a girl, teenagers an adolescent, adults an adult. It opens identification beyond gender, age, and social status. The swazzle’s voice also conceals the identity of the puppeteer: so long as the artificial voice is speaking, nothing is known about the performer. This may well explain the presence of women puppeteers in a world long reserved for men — Mayhew offers a compelling hypothesis about the feminine origins of this tradition:

Gradually, we drew inspiration from these sources to bring into live performance the tools and techniques depicted or described in the historical record — adopting some, setting others aside. This process unfolded through constant back-and-forth: each trial on stage informed the next, in an ongoing cycle of experimentation, performance, and reassessment.

February 2025 — Pordenone, Italy, Porto Arlecchino, research residency.We visit our friends Claudia Contin Arlecchino and Luca Fantinutti to further our research. They are specialists in Commedia dell’Arte — a tradition deeply intertwined with glove puppetry: both share the same trestles and public squares, and a number of specific theatrical codes. Drawing on their expertise and their eye for visual form, we sketch the first drafts of Judy’s and Punch’s physiognomy. We find ourselves inspired by the masks that inhabit every corner of their studio-home, Porto Arlecchino. Claudia and Luca set us to work with Da Vinci’s grotesque drawings, Asian masks, and their own research into Burnacini’s iconography, conducted for the Theatre Museum in Vienna.

A month later, we carve and stitch Judy, Punch, and the child.

We still need the puppet booth — we have the frame, but not the fabric. We want a white and blue madras, like those British puppeteers used in the nineteenth century (see Rowlandson, Haydon, …). We scour every fabric merchant in northern Italy before finally tracking it down. The supplier can’t provide enough of a single bolt. The roof is cut from a second one.

At last, we can tackle the dramaturgy.

Collier’sPunch and Judyis an incomplete trace of a living practice: the dialogue and song lyrics are there, with a few notes, but gestures, silences, and the choreography of the hands remain implicit. Our work consists, first and foremost, in reading between the lines of this scenario — identifying dramatic intentions, the actions and gestures that lead up to speech. We choose to stage only the first act, in which Punch does away with his child and his wife in turn. Léandre, standing beside the booth, takes on the role of the showman. In May, we adopt a Jack Russell terrier — the dog being a central figure in the iconography and the opening scene of Act I. He is still in training and does not yet perform, but we hope he will eventually allow us to stage the full act. For now, we present only its second half: the scenes with Judy and the child.

Faced with this text, we cannot ignore the violence of the scenario, nor the fact that the audience applauds a male hero who is dominant and violent. So, we choose to give agency to Judy. She will be the protagonist: she will be on the puppeteer’s dominant hand and will speak with the swazzle. The audience will acclaim her, she will enter first, she will command the stage, she will be loved. The puppet booth becomes a metaphor: its walls are the walls of the home, the enclosed space where domestic violence thrives in invisibility. Judy is confined within it. Léandre is the Showman, a witness: his human presence, in constant dialogue with the audience and the figures, is a perpetual reminder that this is, above all, theatre.

We have chosen to silence Punch: his lines will be replaced by music, played live by Léandre on the post horn. To preserve intelligibility, Léandre will initially render the horn into words — in time, the melodies alone suffice, the audience having absorbed their meaning. This separation between manipulation and voice produces a distancing effect that opens a space for reflection, tempering the violence of the words.

June 2025 — Fyé, artistic residency.We begin experimenting and improvising scenes. We place great emphasis on rewriting and translating the lyrics of the original songs, which are central to the show and carry a second narrative perspective. For instance, at the opening of the show:

We present excerpts of the work-in-progress to pupils at the primary school where we are in residence. The reception is joyful — the children laugh, participate, and grasp what is at stake. The teachers are more unsettled: unsettled by this capacity to laugh at violence, and by the prospect of a tragicomedy being performed for children. To engage with violence means accepting the complexity of showing without endorsing — and we understand that staging this show, in English no less, will be no straightforward undertaking. We decide to translate part of the dialogue to make it more accessible.

August 2025 — Aurillac, France, international street theatre festival.We don’t have a finished show but we have the canvas, the songs, and the gestures. We perform at 10 am in a park, to an audience of early risers and those who haven’t yet gone to bed. The show lands and provokes — we are met with a wealth of responses, particularly from Gen Z, who are deeply invested in these questions. It becomes clear that violence remains a genuine taboo, and that this is precisely what makes it worth staging. Even treated with all the distance that puppetry allows, finding the right balance is delicate. The festival audience doesn’t know Punch and reads the show as an original creation rather than a rewriting. It is therefore up to us to stand fully behind the show and the violence it contains. It is here, adjusting and rewriting the show each day, that we grasp the balance between the seductiveness and fascination of Judy, Punch and the child, and the violence they are capable of. We settle on the show’s structure around the path and the cycle of violence: honeymoon, tension, violence, justification.

September 2025 — Colle Umberto, Italy, Puppet Festival.Translating the show into Italian reveals new musical and rhythmic inflections. Certain songs shift into the minor key deepen the emotional register, while the Latin tongue lends the whole a lyrical, operatic quality. We perform before three hundred people, at nightfall in a garden.

September 2025 — Charleville-Mézières, France, FMTM.We play in the squares to full houses of discerning, international audiences; we discuss the repertoire with British, Dutch, Italian and American practitioners. We are a little apprehensive about the purists’ reaction, but in the end everyone accepts Judy speaking with a swazzle.

September 2025 — Tournai, Belgium, Maison de la Marionnette.Three hundred people in the middle of the Grand-Place, no amplification. Anastasia blows into her swazzle and Léandre shouts to be heard. The audience is deeply moved — including survivors of domestic violence — and Gen Z, once again, is thoroughly won over.

October 2025 — Liège, Belgium, Atelier DeFo.We perform indoors, before an adult and intellectual audience. The voice can rest, and we play with the dynamics. What is at stake comes through with far greater clarity, and we can explore the subtlety of movement. Darkness transforms the reception: it isolates each spectator in their own relationship with the booth, allowing freer interpretation and a more intimate engagement.

We have approachedJudy & Punchas one might approach a classic: starting from the text, the contemporary gaze reveals the power of the narrative. Collier’s scenario holds dramatic material and moral tensions that speak profoundly to what it means to be human. It is rich, it deserves multiple productions; ours is only one version. Others are possible and necessary — including the original, faithful to the text. What this creative adventure teaches us is that before discarding this heritage, we might look at it in all its complexity and try to understand the extent to which our society still needs it.

The show ends with a gesture of emancipation: Judy steps out of the booth and breaks free from violence. Mister Punch remains alone inside.