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“It’s New Eyes We’re Trying to Create”: Speaking with Blind Summit’s Mark Down

Mark Down is the artistic director and co-creator of Blind Summit, a puppet theatre company based in London, founded in 1997. I spoke with him following his 2013 tour of the United States with the production of The Table, for which Mark was both director and the lead puppeteer on a Bunraku-style puppet named Moses. Moses is the only character in The Table. With its comic combination of scripted and improvised dialogue organized into a stream of related bits, the show has the rhythm, reason, and punch of a standup routine. The Table is thus a show about a show. However, rather than placing an external analytical frame on an otherwise unknowing cast in the style of Six Characters in Search of an Author, The Table locates the analytical frame inside a single character—Moses, a puppet whose primary narrative is about being a puppet. Publicity materials for The Table explain that Moses is having an “existential crisis.” But while Moses is interested in aspects of his existence, there is little in his seventyminute monologue that suggests a crisis. He is simply interested in deriving humor from the nature of his being: a raspy, lusty, boisterous, and occasionally bawdy composition of cloth and cardboard, assigned to soliloquize on a tabletop. The narration of Moses’s backstory—most notably his development as part of a short performance commissioned by the London Jewish Community Centre—is intertwined with discussion of his relationship with the three puppeteers who operate him, and includes a detailed orientation to puppeteering. The Table’s lessons are, in this respect, disarming and direct. The show also operates on a higher plane, as we are invited to meditate not only on the relationship between the team of humans and their simple construction, but also the relationship between the character and his platform (the table itself ), and the relationship between illusion and material reality. “You can’t choose what you believe,” Moses points out in the second half of the show.