Which is more versatile? A flat puppet on a couple of sticks, or a multi-string marionette? Most people would opt for the strings, but according to shadow puppeteer Stephen Kaplin the opposite is true.
'Look!' he exclaimed, holding up a little Chinese cartoon character against the light.
'Here he's small, here he gets bigger,' he said moving the shadow figure towards the light. 'And here he takes up the whole screen', he said, suddenly moving the translucent face on to the projector itself, filling the theatre screen with an inquisitive painted eye.
It is the difference between Wallace And Gromit and Tom And Jerry: the cat and mouse, while flat, are capable of far more crazy activities when in the hands of experienced animators.
'Designing a shadow show is a bit like designing a film,' said Kaplin, whose theatre credits include designing and building the shadow scenes in the Broadway version of The Lion King. 'Each character can have several shadows, depending on its size, or what it is feeling, and you just swap it around,' he said.
To demonstrate, he showed a highly cinematographic story board sequence for Na Zha, the play he and partner Fong Kuang-yu are working on with Hong Kong's Ming Ri Theatre Company, to be performed at the Cultural Centre Studio Theatre between December 30 and January 3.
