Eric Bramall (1921 – 1996)

There are few puppet masters worldwide whose talent for bringing a marionette to life before a spellbound audience can also leave other puppeteers watching and gasping in admiration. Eric Bramall was one of the few, so much so even the great Russian puppet master Sergei Obrzstov was happy to call him ‘Maestro’.

Eric’s career was long and hard working. He started as a bright teenager from Wallasey near Liverpool, acting, painting and studying architecture. He built and toured his first shows round the major variety theatres and music and arts societies of the time with his mothers help and interest. After a period working in Vale Park Wallasey and on New Brighton pier he moved to Colwyn Bay appearing in various venues as well as his own his theatre within the band stand in the town’s Erias Park.

Within a few years of moving to the area he had built his own perfect theatre in the garden of an old family friend. The Harlequin Puppet Theatre stands on Cayley Promenade in Rhos on Sea, just along from Colwyn Bay. Its opening brought him his first loyal helper in Millicent Ford, the daughter of the house in whose garden the theatre stood. As his own mother’s health deteriorated a young puppeteer he had got to know locally called Chris Somerville, joined the small team. The shows performed at the Harlequin often attracted more adults than children with locals and holidaymakers returning each year, all happy to sit an hour or so and enjoy seeing both the puppets and Eric’s painted auditorium with its faux arches and classical landscaped gardens.

Eric was like Harlequin, quick, deft and multitalented, full of wild enthusiasm and wicked fun to be with. He loved to be ‘on stage’, in control of both puppets and his audience. Working only through commercial channels and private enterprise, never receiving a grant in recognition of his or Chris’s talents, he set up an award-winning building, the first of its kind in the UK, to house his puppets and the shows they performed. For 38 years Eric ran the Harlequin providing new productions each year. Though mainly working with marionettes, the majority of which were designed and performed by him, he also performed with skill and dexterity in glove, rod and shadow puppets. Their repertoire consisted of operas such as ‘The Mikado’, dramatic plays like ‘Dr Faustus’ and variety like ‘The Magic Toyshop’, and the ‘Puppet Circus’. While in search of the ‘avant garde’ in the 1950’s Eric blazed the trail with ‘The New Puppetry’ shocking many in the puppetry community with ‘The Emergence of Man’, ‘Nuclear Romance’ and ‘God and the Puppeteer’.

In 1963 he made Colwyn Bay the home of the UK’s first international puppet festival. Over forty countries took part including those from the Eastern block, a real challenge at that time, as well as puppeteers from the USA and of course a variety of British puppeteers too. Another festival followed in 1968 both artistically and financially successful, and a result a puppet centre was created further down the promenade in Rhos on Sea to display Eric’s collection of puppets.

He wrote books; ‘Making a Start with Marionettes’ (1960), ‘Puppet Plays and Playwriting’ (1961) and ‘Expert Puppet Technique, a Puppeteers Production Manuel’ (1964) co-authored with Chris Somerville.

Then there was television; over one thousand scripts written and produced from 1946 onwards. They were often made for BBC Wales and the first introduction for many children to a revival of the Welsh language (though neither Eric or Chris spoke Welsh!) later they also produced television for Yorkshire TV with some of their series being shown across Europe. Series made included ‘Lili Lon’, ‘Tedi Twt’, ‘O Dan Y Mori’, ‘Jimmy Green and his Time Machine’, ‘Sugar Ball’, ‘Hubble Bubble’, ‘Mr Trimble’ and ‘Dianes Magic Book’.

In addition to all this activity he also continued to perform his own cabaret act, gave talks, taught on the Harlequin Puppet Theatre Summer School and travelled around the world with Chris as part of a marionette cabaret double act.

Eric died suddenly in 1996, yet his legacy continues both in the puppeteers he inspired or trained and in the puppet theatre he had the foresight to build. Many years earlier in a letter to puppeteer and friend Jane Phillips he reflected on his contribution to puppetry;

“My contribution is trying to preserve the magic of the traditional puppetry show, its intimate atmosphere, the proscenium which hides it all, the glowing crimson curtain which rises to give a glimpse of a fantastic worked peopled by impossible beings, who do not live as we do, but do live.”

With thanks to Jane Phillips