Hands and Feet for Captain Corelli

Booking is now open for Captain Corelli’s Mandolin at the Mercury Theatre in Colchester from 27^th October to 12^th November.

You can book online by clicking here Mercury Theatre box office or telephone +44 (0)1206 573948. Performances are at 7.30pm Monday to Friday with matinee performances Thurs 2^nd and 10^th November at 2.00pm and Saturday 5^th and 12^th at 2.30pm.

The show is a co-production between the Mercury Theatre Company and the Marjanishvili Theatre in Tbilisi, in association with NFA International Arts and Culture. Four actors from the Mercury will be joined by one actor and six puppeteers from the Marjanshvili in a production directed by Levan Tsuladze.

This is the fourth post on the blog charting the progress of the production. To see them in chronological order, click on the links on the right, starting from July!

You Need Hands

In the last blog we showed how the heads were being made for the production of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Several of the puppets will be representations of real actors in the show, and are therefore carefully modelled from reality whilst others appear only as puppets, giving greater design freedom. But all of them need hands and feet, meaning 32 pairs of hands and 32 pairs of feet.

The hands are made from a special substance that can be worked and modelled like clay but dries in the air into a hardened substance that can be carved and used like wood. Each hand takes about half a day to make although with drying time at each stage it mounts up to several days. The feet are less complex and are carved from wood.

The picture on the left shows the basic structure of the hands. They may look like egg whisks but these show the palms of the hands with the wires ready to become fingers. You’ll notice how the thumbs are placed on the top and the fingers come from the centre of the 'palm'. Each hand is operated by a rod, which will be added at a later stage. They are not actually directly attached to the body, although it will look as though they are.

The next stage, shown in the picture on the right, is to build up the fingers using the special ‘plastic wood’. This is a long process as it has to be done with a small piece at a time because the material dries in the air; simply rolling up a piece of the material and sticking it to the wire won’t work because it would just crumble. Once the basic finger is made it is further modelled with extra pieces of plastic wood being added in a painstaking process. In this picture you can see one pair of hands with just the palms and wire, one pair with the fingers partly made and two pairs of children’s hands – too small for individual fingers!

Sanding down the rough work makes a smooth, realistic hand, another time consuming process. Each hand is then individually painted in a neutral colour and hung up to dry.

This video shows you the process. Nino is making adjustments to the fingers; Ani is rubbing them down and painting; and finally, Maia is putting finishing touches to the feet.

Next step will be making the bodies and putting the puppets together. And of course there are the various animals to be made. Watch this space!

Are you in Edinburgh for the festival?

You can catch Mike Maran Mike Maran, who has written the stage adaptation and is playing Dr Iannis, in Edinburgh where is performing 3 of his shows at Valvona and Crolla (venue 67): A Funny Valentine, about the life of jazz musician Chet Baker; Did You Used To Be RD Laing, about the controversial Scottish psychaiatrist; and Italia ‘n’ Caledonia, the story of the early immigrants from Italy who settled in Scotland, not least Mike’s own family and that of Philip Contini who now owns Valvona and Crolla. Full details are here on Mike Maran's website

You can also see another production from the Mercury Theatre, Wretch by Gari Jones at the Gryphon Point Hotel (venue 109a)  Full details can be found here

32 heads for Captain Corelli's Mandolin

It’s astonishing to see how much work goes into making a puppet. Nino Namicheishvili is responsible for designing and making the puppets for Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, a process that will take over six months. Working from her tiny workshop in the Marjanishvili Theatre she is helped by a small group of trusted friends but she’s the only one who’s there in the morning and still there at midnight.  

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin opens at the Marjanishvili Theatre in Tbilisi as part of the Tbilisi International Festival of Theatre on 5 October. It opens at the Mercury Theatre in Colchester on 27 October and runs there until 12 November. Booking for the Colchester performances is open now – www.mercurytheatre.co.uk or telephone +44 (0)1206 573948

At the end of this post you’ll find a link to a video where Nino introduces the main characters but before you go there, spare some time to look at the process.


All the puppets for Captain Corelli’s Mandolin will be rod puppets. They are made up of six main sections – the head, the body, two hands and two feet – each controlled by a rod. Since puppeteers only have two hands, each puppet is operated by three, and sometimes four, manipulators.

An added attraction with the puppets for Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is that many of them are based on the real actors who will be playing the characters. Sometimes the audience will be watching the actors, sometimes the puppets take over. The first challenge for Nino was therefore to make puppets that would represent the real actors and that’s more difficult than it appears. It’s not simply a matter of making an accurate copy.

This is not Madam Tussaud’s; the puppets have to display a character of their own and that must be achieved without any change in facial expression.

This series of photographs of Tony Casement, who plays Captain Corelli, gives an idea of the attention to detail. There will be two Corelli puppets – one for during the main setting of the play and one showing him many years later (forget the film – read the book!) but both need to be identifiably him. The same is true of Natuka Kakhidze who plays Pelagia.

For this production the puppets heads are moulded using a special substance that’s a bit like glue when it’s soft and stone when it hardens. Once out of the mould the head is finished by hand and given its distinctive character.

It feels almost painful to see it but each head is then drilled with two holes to enable the controlling mechanism to be inserted and the operation is done with all the care of a brain surgeon.

The heads are painted in a neutral colour to finish them off rather than having a face painted on; it’s lighting that brings them to life. Hair is added at the end.

At the last count there were 32 puppets in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin but there’s always the chance that director, Levan Tsuladze, will demand more so Nino has made a couple of spares. And that’s before you count a goat, a pine marten and 2 dolphins. Making heads for characters that are not also represented by live actors gives more scope for creativity but, of course, they still have to fit within the overall style of the show.

32 puppets means 64 hands and 64 feet! Each single hand takes about half a day to make and is in itself quite a complex process. More of that in the next blog.

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin opens at the Marjanishvili Theatre in Tbilisi as part of the Tbilisi International Festival of Theatre on 5 October. It opens at the Mercury Theatre in Colchester on 27 October and runs there until 12 November. Booking for the Colchester performances is open now – www.mercurytheatre.co.uk or telephone +44 (0)1206 573948

Here's the link to YouTube with Nino introducing the cast