All Dolled Up

For most Western audiences, puppet theater is identified either with provocative comedy, à la Crank Yankers or Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, or with educational entertainment for children, such as The Muppets or Sesame Street. But the puppets featured in director Anthony Minghella’s production of Madama Butterfly were inspired by Japanese Bunraku theater, a serious and sophisticated art form established in the late 17th century in the city of Osaka. The art of puppet plays accompanied by musical narration has a long history in Japan, appearing as early as the 11th century. Like the stylized theatrical genre of kabuki, which dates from close to the same time and shares many of the same stories, Bunraku was from its inception an entertainment created for ordinary people, unlike other dramatic forms of the time that were performed exclusively for the nobility and samurai classes.

Bunraku puppeteers go through lengthy apprenticeships to master the form, which may account for the gradual waning of its popularity in the 19th century. But there are still a number of practitioners today in Japan, and interest has revived in recent years, including in the West. Mark Down and Nick Barnes, the founders of Blind Summit Theatre, take inspiration from this tradition for their puppet-theater presentations. For Minghella’s production, they created Bunraku-style puppets to represent Cio-Cio-San’s child, her servants, and, in a dream sequence, Cio-Cio-San herself. Generally one-half to two-thirds life size, a Bunraku puppet has no strings and is operated by three puppeteers, dressed in black and discreetly visible to the audience, each responsible for a different body part.

One particularly striking example of this production’s use of Bunraku-style puppetry is Cio-Cio-San’s night vigil during the Act III intermezzo (MOoD clip 32). In this scene, Cio-Cio-San awaits Pinkerton’s arrival after glimpsing his ship in Nagasaki harbor. In Minghella’s staging, her silent vigil is accompanied by an extended ballet incorporating Bunraku-style puppets as she fantasizes about a romantic reunion with Pinkerton after three years apart.