Title: Chair
Name of organisation: Puppet Centre Trust
How long in present post? As Chair, 3 years; as member of staff and then Board member, 28 years
Phone: 020 7622 5058
Email: pct@puppetcentre.demon.co.uk
What does your organisation do?
It is a charity, a resource, concerned with the promotion and promulgation of the arts and crafts of puppetry in all its forms.
What does your current job involve?
As for any Chair, helping to guide and sustain the Centre, and to make it useful and relevant to contemporary practitioners.
Who did you used to work for and what did you do?
I was Puppetry Tutor at the Central School of Speech and Drama, now consultant, semi-retired.
What do you enjoy most about your present post?
The contact with emerging practitioners and helping to make good new work known here and abroad.
What do you find most difficult in your present post?
Serious lack of funding which threatens the Puppet Centre?s existence.
What is your career ambition?
To leave the Centre properly funded and dynamically functioning.
Who has influenced your career to date the most - and why?
The late A.R. Philpott and Barry Smith, and the present teacher and writer Henryk Jurkowski, also Margareta Niculescu. All thinkers and/or practitioners who have pushed forward and outwards the boundaries of puppetry.
If you could have done any job in the world what would you like to have done?
Been a member of a professional classical music chamber group.
If you had three wishes for the future of the arts, what would they be?
1.To get proper funding for the infra-structure of puppetry.
2.To leave the puppet centre thriving.
3.To find the time and space to write my planned book on puppetry in contemporary theatre.