In the autumn of 2003, Poh Sim Plowright went to Rajasthan—the cradle of string puppetry, where the Creator is perceived as the Arch Puppeteer controlling humans through strings—in search of the provenance of its famed string-puppet tradition (kathputli). She found an ancient collection of thirty-two stories—Sinhasan Battisi—(hitherto unknown in the West), focusing on a golden throne and female puppet power, which provides eloquent testimony to the original importance of the puppet art in that part of India. Yet in the streets of Udaipur today, that art seems to have been reduced to gaudy souvenirs and variety acts aimed at the foreign tourist. The old stories with their nourishing narrative frameworks are gone, and the town of Bassi, once famous for its wood-carvers and specialist puppet-makers, has abandoned its traditional rituals and techniques in the face of commercialism. In this article, the author considers the current state of string puppetry in Rajasthan in the absence of these rituals and stories, and looks at the possible future of the art. Poh Sim Plowright is Senior Lecturer in Oriental Drama and the Director of the Noh Centre at Royal Holloway, University of London.

When is a widely-known fairy tale more than a story? Poh Sim Plowright recently went to South Thailand and North Malaysia to examine the relevance of the ‘birdwoman’ folk tale to the lives of the villagers1 in those two regions. Here the local people still participate in a ritual dramatization of a story which for them represents a crucial renewal of life in their yearly calendar – a celebration of the roots of feminine magical power which goes back to the ancient historical south-east Asian practice by which a victorious ruler would carry back as booty to his kingdom the wives and dancers of the vanquished. Since most of the members of these royal harems were mediums gifted with special powers of healing and communicating with spirits, they were seen as valuable additions to a ruler's aura of divinity – and consequently to his terrestrial power. More importantly, the theatrical art form known as Manora, which enshrines the ‘birdwoman’ tale, is said to have been founded by two royal female trance mediums, regarded as primal healers and guardians of a life-renewing elixir: thus, each performance also serves as a shamanic and healing ritual. The performances here described by Poh Sim Plowright also have links with drama in China and Japan, and at the end of her article she explores the powerful connection with W. B. Yeats's celebrated ‘birdwoman’ play, At the Hawk's Well, which features a ‘Hawk’ Woman guarding a ‘well of miraculous water’ against male intrusion. Poh Sim Plowright is Director of the Centre for the Study of Noh Drama and Lecturer in Oriental Drama at Royal Holloway College, University of London.

Poh Sim Plowright recently spent six weeks in Quanzhou, in the Fujian Province of China, watching the puppeteers, actors, and audiences of her native Fujian theatre tradition. Here she was able to observe at first hand the principle of inversion that, she believes, underlies all Chinese theatre: and in the following article she argues that this principle is clearly illustrated by the string puppet and human theatres of Quanzhou, whose origins can be traced to the official ‘Pear Garden Theatre’ set up in the eighth century by the Tang Emperor, Ming Huang. Theatre in this part of South China is, Plowright suggests, living testimony to the continuing basis of Chinese theatre in the practice of ancestor worship, through which most performances become sacrificial offerings – a connection she believes Brecht to have missed in his celebrated confrontation with Chinese acting techniques in Moscow in 1935. Poh Sim Plowright is Lecturer in Oriental Drama and Director of the Noh Centre in the Department of Drama, Theatre, and Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of a book on the Noh, and also of several plays and features on theatrical subjects for BBC Radio Three.