The Shadow Teller's Plays

Book excerpt: In a volume containing 14 original plays – including three shadow-play adaptions of Gogol, Morton and Runyon classics – the author resurrects a sadly neglected theatre genre – the shadow play combining traditional shadow techniques with normal acting to create ‘full-bodied’ mainstream plays. These plays do not use shadow puppetry-type techniques that need people contorting themselves, however wonderfully, to form shapes, but rather normal acting prowess together and usual props of mainstream theatre with the new back-lighting technologies. The result is plays which are realistic and yet overlain with the imaginative fantasies that figure theatre can bring… in a fallow area lying between mime and conventional stage plays… a rediscovered form of a modern staging that crosses between live and shadow effect, whether in workshopping for all ages and group-size or for professional productions. Shadow plays comprise the theatre landscape for live actors re-skilled to jump from behind-the-screen one-dimensional acting to front-of-the-screen three-dimensional acting at any moment of the play. They allow a new and exciting way of presenting the combination of the real and the surreal in ways that offer broadened audience and student experiences, under the master-of-storytelling of a shadow teller together with the master-of-pacing of a mobile light spotter.