Category Archives: Design

Meet Our Puppet Director! An Interview with Catherine McRae

Posted on by under Design, Interview, Mystery Plays, York Mystery Plays 2026

Recently, I [Laura-Elizabeth Rice, director for “The War in Heaven”] sat down with Catherine McRae, our puppet director, to discuss making and working with puppets. HIDden has never really worked with puppets before, so this has been an exciting addition to our productoin. I’m deeply grateful for all the work Catherine is doing, as the puppet demons really are adding a lot to our Hell, and also for everything that I’m learning from her along the way. I want to preface this interview by candidly admitting that I probably didn’t know enough about the incredibly nuanced world that is puppetry as we started this show, and Catherine’s contributions have not only therefore been vital to the success of our puppets, they’ve also made me grow in perspectives as well. I hope you’ll find this interview as utterly fascinating and eye-opening as I did! [Note: this interview has been edited for brevity.]

So tell me about your background and what got you started in all of this. 

My background is as an actor, drama facilitator, puppeteer. And I’ve been interested in storytelling in one way or another for as long as I can remember. I did all the stuff you would expect- youth theatre, amateur dramatics, and went to uni to study it and uni was where I was formally introduced to puppetry. Since graduating, I’ve had various life experiences, which have led me to focusing on specific types of puppetry or specific communities I want to work with. 

What got you into theatre in the first place? 

I was very, very lucky that theatre was never uncommon or strange to me. My parents introduced me to theatre quite young so the option to get involved in theatre was always there for me. And I never lose sight of the fact that that is an enormous privilege, to have a family that are able to regularly take their kids to the theatre. Growing up, I also got to meet lots of different people from different backgrounds, which highlighted to me that actually, you are in quite a privileged position to just think that going to the theatre is a normal thing to do because there are clearly lots of people who don’t!

Why puppets specifically?

I grew up in the late 90s, early noughties, so there was quite a lot of puppetry around, particularly in British children’s television, because although you did get animation and CGI, it wasn’t anything like it is today. So [puppets] have always been in my life to some extent. The thing I find interesting about puppets is the reaction you get from other people. It’s often a very strong reaction- sometimes it’s a negative reaction, and sometimes it’s a positive reaction- but you always get a very strong reaction to puppets so as someone who’s interested in stories and storytelling, that was an interesting tool. And I also found myself focusing on puppetry for adults, [which] has an additional challenge…. You generally have to do a lot of work beforehand to suspend their disbelief and get them to believe in the puppet on stage, but when you do it, you end up with some really powerful pieces of theatre. I’ve seen productions that have used puppets to talk about really hard-hitting topics like the benefit system…. it gives you a way in to difficult topics that people may not connect with as much.

So what do you think it is about puppets that makes people react so-?

I use the word viscerally; whether good or ill- I think it depends on whether you hate them or like them. There’s a lot of iconography around puppets being in horror films and used for nefarious means, so I can understand the fear around puppets. And particularly the background [puppets] had: when shadow puppets were being made in places like China, [historically] it was an alchemist who would do them, so there was a sense of magic and something ethereal about them. If you like them, there’s something quite innocent about them, something quite open and vulnerable… and I think people respond to that really well.

When is the earliest puppetry that we’re aware of? I assume it’s going way back…

Something like 87 BC… they have always been around in some shape or form, particularly shadow puppetry. Then you’ve got marrionettes, which are a type of puppetry that came much later. There’s a lot of different types of puppetry that have originated from different spaces over time, but puppetry as a whole is something we’ve always been doing. 

What’s the best project that you’ve done? What’s your favourite among things you’ve worked on? 

A show I did for my dissertation when I was at university about fan culture and mental illness. I was doing a lot of the work myself and putting in the hours for that. There’s lots of other things I’ve done since that I’m very proud of. But I’d say that one is was sort of a big one, so to speak. 

What is the best thing about puppets and what’s the worst?

I think the best thing about puppets for me is getting to play with them [puppets]! I’m one of those people who, when I see a puppet, and I start playing with a puppet, I find it very hard to put it down. On several occasions, we’ve been playing with puppets, and someone has said, leave the puppets, come and sit down. And everybody else would dump their puppets and go and sit down. I would walk over with my puppet still breathing, still acting, and sit it on my lap as if it was listening to the conversation because I couldn’t put it down… I’d say the worst thing about working with puppets is that people have a lot of misunderstandings about puppetry and what is required to make a good piece of puppetry, it can sort of be trivialized and turn into people seeing puppets as glorified props and actually it’s a lot more complicated and requires a lot more skill than that!

I was really fascinated when you had [our puppet] Beelzebub in the rehearsal “breathing.” I know you’d mentioned breathing and I was thinking [of] our breathing and seeing you move him I realised he also breathes! I think my next question follows on from that- what do you think people should know about puppetry that they don’t know?

It’s more complicated than it looks, definitely. With certain types of puppetry people [realise] it’s complicated quite quickly. There are other types where people think it’s easy, but in practice, it’s actually really complicated. With shows like War Horse, the amount of physical stamina you need in order to do that is often understated…! Anyone can pick up an object and make it talk, but if you want people to believe it’s not a piece of paper talking, that takes a lot more work and a lot more skill.

 What are the biggest challenges in working with puppets? 

It would be the same kind of thing. Particularly if I’m the one puppeteering them it’s making sure that I get the support that I need. It’s not so much of a thing on this [project] because I’m not going to be operating the puppets so I can ensure that the actors are actually having enough time with [them] and they are getting the direction from me, but there have been times [when I’ve] needed that sort of guidance- when you’re behind the puppet often you’re not seeing what the audience is seeing, so having that outside eye is really helpful. The real challenge is the misunderstandings that other creatives can have about puppets and how that shows up in the rehearsal space.

Do you have a favourite puppet that you’ve ever made or worked with? 

Hopefully it’ll be one I’m making currently! 

Do you get emotionally attached to them once you’ve made them? 

You definitely get emotionally attached if you’re working with them and performing with them. But I think the connection is sometimes a bit different. A lot of the shadow puppetry I’ve done, for example, has been on film…. and it’s a lot more of a practical mindset. Obviously, there’s elements of creativity in there, but in terms of the emotional connection, it’s much more practical. Whereas if you’re having to physically inhabit something for a period of time you’re going to get emotionally attached…. There’s a difference between types in how you relate. I think particularly when you’re having to infuse an object with a character it’s-  I’m going slightly off topic here but I did a module at university, between the creative writing  and acting students. [We were] studying a play where a character kills another charecter, and there was this very strong divide of the writers going, “This person is evil, this person brings this girl to a place with the intention of killing her.”  The actors very much went, “No, this person is triggered during the conversation. Yes, he does a horrible thing, but ultimately he’s not an evil person,” and … the conclusion I came to was that writers can write particularly evil characters without inhabiting them, whereas if you have to inhabit that person night after night, you have to really think about what their thought process is and so you have to come up with some rationale for why you do evil things. All of that to say that when you’re having to really get into the character… there is that emotional attachment because you’ve been through it with that puppet or with that character.

Do you have any advice for anybody who wants to know more about puppets or get involved with them?

 I’d say just start playing with stuff. [Don’t assume] that you have to have a full-size Jim Henson-style puppet in order to start. It’s something that you can just play with. Practising the technique is super easy. Just grab whatever you’ve got and try and infuse it with a character. And there are some brilliant resources out there on puppetry. A lot of people will do a beginner’s course on puppetry. But also there’s a book called A Practical Guide to Puppetry by Mark Down that’s got lots of stuff about puppetry. I’d also say go and see as much puppetry as you can…. I guess it’s the same for every creative art: See it and do it. 

What kind of things go into creating puppets, designing them, ideas, processes? 

It changes, depending on the project…. When you’re making a puppet you have to think: what is the style of the production, are you making cute or scary puppets, animals or humans, performing indoors or outdoors, is it a large group or a small group- that will then impact how big your puppet needs to be, what types of materials you need, who’s actually puppeteering them. There’s quite a lot that goes into it. 

Thank you so much! This was so interesting! I’ve definitely learned a lot, I’m sure I’ll learn a lot more as the show goes on!

If you’d like to learn more about Catherine’s work, please follow her on Instagram (@cathymcraee). And come see The War in Heaven’s puppets live on 28 June and 5 July with the York Mystery Plays!

Behind the Scenes: Thousands of Feathers & Finger Painting

Posted on by under Design, Musings, York Mystery Plays 2026

For this week’s #MysteryPlaysMonday, “The War in Heaven”‘s designer talks about what’s going on with the costumes, and working with our brilliant crafting volunteers.

Do a Mystery Play, they said. It’ll be fun, they said. And truth be told, they were right! What they didn’t mention was the angel feathers… the thousands and thousands of angel feathers… the glitter… the marabou fluff… the shedding of a thousand fabrics… all of it trailing along after you, like some bizarre but fabulous slug trail. And that’s before we get to the paint. If this sounds like I’m complaining, I’m really not; it’s said with a smile. But there is no denying that making our costumes has been a messy process!

To be fair, we’re quite lucky. We had angels in our play in 2014 and we have angels in our play this year, and our angel costumes are in quite good shape, so we’re able to reuse them. I’m quite proud of our angel costumes- yeah, I’ve heard them referred to as the “chicken suits” but I stand by the many, many instances where medieval angels have feathered bodies. The trouble with the angel costumes isn’t the things themselves, it’s the fact that we simply don’t have enough of them. We have to make more. And that means: making lots of feathers.

There are many ways you can achieve feathers. Our angels’ large wings, beautifully crafted for York Theatre Royal, use foam and faux fur for their feathers. (We’re extremely pleased to have these wings on loan; they date from the 1992 production in the theatre, and thus connect our play today to a different strand of modern Mystery Plays history.) Our smaller wings are covered in actual bird feathers. Medieval angels likely had their costumes made our of leather and/or fabric. I decided that large-weave canvas was the ideal material, because I wanted something that would fray easily but wouldn’t do so in a stringy, tangled manner. Gold glitter-glue is used to give them some sparkle, but it serves a very functional purpose, making sure that the fraying of the edges of the feathers doesn’t extend to them falling apart. They look great at a distance (say, on a waggon!) but they’re quite tedious to make, especially the fraying part. In 2014 I lost all the feeling in my finger tips for about six months from fraying the costumes; this year I watched one of our volunteer costume makers use a seam ripper to do them quite efficiently and I was horrified that I hadn’t just done that! Sewing them on is no picnic, either, as one has a lapful of material with hundreds of feathers pinned on- which means hundreds of pins, ready to catch your legs, your arms, your hands, at any moment. It’s a bit like cuddling a porcupine.

Our fallen angels don’t get to look shiny and feathery- they’ve come through the fires of hell already, and they’re not pretty. A scour of York’s charity shops gave us the base pieces, and then the costume volunteers went to town! They literally tore the clothing apart, putting holes in the pieces, some of which were then patched with canvas mesh (saved from an old screen tent my family used to take camping- costuming is a lesson in never throwing things away!) or fabric painted to look bloody. We sewed on dangling strands of the same bloody material, while some pieces had the additions of chain or rope as well. All of them have some feathers, but they’re brown and black, “singed” from those hellfires. And then they all got painted: we set up a space where grown adults could pour paint on their hands and smash it all over the costumes. The painting experience was giving me flashbacks to early childhood: I could practically smell the finger paints my mum used to give me when I was a toddler. The results really worked: any shine on the fabric was dulled, and some of them really did look like the fallen angels had been through something- possibly a dung heap. If only we could figure out a way to make them smell the way they look….

Much of costuming, like theatre itself, is about trying things and seeing what works, but there are also times where experience lends knowledge that might be otherwise obscure. Simply mucking in with “finger paints” was a volunteer’s wise suggestion, and worked much better than using brushes. Another pearl from someone with excellent wardrobe credentials was to use coffee grounds for dirt on the costumes. As always, the volunteers bring their knowledge with them, and I learn things that are useful now and for the future. I also appreciate their willingness to get messy. Acting, of course, takes a certain amount of courage- but as someone who can’t stand having anything sticky or gritty on her hands, I think it takes some courage to wade into the messiness of costumes, as well! Not everyone enjoys this sort of thing, and I appreciate beyond measure the people who aren’t afraid to get messy with paint, or sit under a pile of pin-studded fabric, in order to achieve something fantastic. 

And I apologise to their families for sending them home trailing clouds of glitter. The Mystery Plays are for everyone… our angels’ glitter is, too.

Director’s Notes: Designing the Mystery

Posted on by under Academic Curiosity, Design, Mystery Plays, York Mystery Plays 2026

Happy Easter #MysteryPlayMonday! We’ve been busy designing our production of “The War In Heaven”, and our show’s director reflects on what it means to imagine portraying heaven, hell, and their inhabitants.

What does an angel look like? How about a daemon? Or Heaven, or Hell?

I’ve been designing this week, getting the answers to those questions get out of my brain and on to paper, so that they can eventually be brought to life on our Mystery Play waggon. The week when I sketch and model, putting to paper what has been evolving in my brain for months, is always fun. And it tends to be when observations that have been quietly bubbling under the surface coalesce into coherent thoughts.

One of the things that I’ve been ruminating on, both from a directorial standpoint concerned with characters, and an visual one concerned with design, is, wacky angels aside, the discrepancy in visual stability between good and evil. I don’t mean in a philosophical or moral sense, I mean in terms of how we picture them. To whit: if you grew up in a western, Christian-dominant society, I bet when you picture God, you envision an old man with white hair and a beard sitting on a throne, gesturing down from a sunny, white-clouded heaven. Your idea of Hell is probably full of fire. If I say the word “angel”, you’re almost definitely picturing wings. (The latter, I have learned, actually has an interesting history, but the development of angels was mostly pretty early in church history, and the idea of a human-based angel was well in place by the time our Mystery Plays were first being performed.)

Hell and daemons seem to offer much more flexibility to people wanting to get creative. If I had to theorise, I’d surmise that it’s because what the biblical texts offer up in terms of Hellish descriptions are among the more… trippy… parts of that literature. And who can blame Christians of the first thousand years of that faith if they felt that, since canonical texts went well off into the creative weeds when describing Hell, they had license to do so as well? If Ezekiel gets credit for the strange angels (I’m planning to write more about them in an upcoming essay), the John who wrote the Book of Revelation can be given the palm for kicking off the creativity of designing Hell. But it was probably Dante Alighieri who sent the ball well and truly rolling. His Divine Comedy was wildly influential throughout the medieval world, probably because his depictions of Heaven and Hell were so detailed and intriguing. Even today, much of what we colloquially think about Hell is based on his writing. But it’s worth noting that, although he wrote both, you hear a lot more about “Dante’s Inferno” than about “Dante’s Paradiso”. 

I am not an expert in the psychology of medieval people or medieval theology, but my guess is that this is in line with why people find the demons of Mankind compelling: it’s easier, as humans who know ourselves to be flawed, to relate to the troublemakers and their world than it is to relate to the idealised space and beings that the angels can offer. Everyone might want to imagine that they align with the angelic sphere, but deep down suspects that they share more in common with the minor devils and their mischief. Additionally, I wonder if there isn’t a bit of a fear of stepping on toes if one gets God or the angels wrong. (Anybody else thinking of the “Monkey Jesus” incident?) You can’t sin against a demon or the Devil by making wrong choices about how they look or where they live, but perhaps people feel that they could do so if they mess up on Heaven. Or perhaps they just recognise that when something exists to be The Ideal, The Perfect Place, no human imagination could begin to create a vision equal to that perfection. You can’t screw up with demons because, by definition, they’re already messed up.

So where does this leave us with designing these characters and their spaces? With opposite challenges! Hell is so wide open, there are almost no limitations, and that can be harder to imagine than something with parameters. Heaven is so constrained by the need to be pleasant and appealing, but it can’t be boring, since boring would be off-putting, which is why (spoiler!) I’m leaning on the “Heaven” panel of “The Garden of Earthly Delights” for inspiration. With our angels, some practical facts are brought into the equation: we had angels in 2014’s “Baptism” so we already own purpose-built angel costumes, although I plan to add to those. Angels with feathers are depicted in so many places throughout medieval art, particularly in architectural spaces, that I remain comfortable with that choice. Would they have been white? Probably not! But this is where the bridge between the historic and the modern come in contact: people today expect angels to be white and would struggle to understand a red-and-gold feathered person as an angel. Historic drama needs to speak across the divide of time, not steamroll past it, and finding the balance between them being able to follow the familiar symbols of stories that they know, and creating something new and memorable, is a fine line to walk in designing.

I don’t know yet if our set for Hell will feature my favourite item from medieval Hell: the Hellmouth. There are practical considerations that might make the decision. But I absolutely love medieval Hellmouths, and I don’t know why they fell out of fashion as embodied things. We still hear the term “hellmouth”, but we’re not usually picturing the wide-mouthed, grinning, surprisingly benevolent-expressioned creature of medieval manuscripts. (I think I wrote years ago that they remind me of dogs asking for belly rubs, and I stand by that!) I do know that our demons are planned to be interesting and multi-faceted. In keeping with the observation that Hell brings out creativity in ways Heaven doesn’t, Hell will be populated by more variety of creatures than Heaven.

And of course, there is God! God is, literally, impossible to design in the way that the character demands, which means we first have to dispense with seeing the character as representing in any way the actual idea of the theological “God”. The God of the Mystery Plays is first and foremost a human being (there’s probably some serious theological layering about Jesus in this- ironically I am writing this on Easter!) and does not have to be what he also cannot be: all things to all people, perfection and omnipotent. One of the really brilliant things about the Mystery Plays over the past 75 years, however, is that God has been: male, female, white, brown, old, young, a child, Christian and, yes, not Christian! Our depiction has always been and probably will be medieval-inspired, but final decisions will probably me made after casting, so that “God” has a chance to influence “who” they will be onstage. One wants, after all, to be at least a tiny bit creative for the creator!

The brilliant thing about the Mystery Plays is that no two groups, either in the same year or across the past seventy five years, have come up with the same answers to these questions. And all of the modern iterations are wildly different from what was going on in the Middle Ages. When I think about the thousands of different minds that have gone into trying to make sense of these characters and their world, for these plays alone, it’s mind-boggling. One of the seminal books on modern mystery plays is titled “Playing God”, reflecting on the literal practice of the actor doing so, but I think it’s in the way all the different teams create their own little slice of the story, in a way that’s uniquely their own, that is truly a miracle of creation.