• Photo: Tony Simpson

  • Photo: Tony Simpson

  • Photo: Tony Simpson

  • Photo: Tony Simpson

Call of the Wild

Blind Summit Theatre have reinvented puppetry for modern adult audiences. Founded in 1997 by Nick Barnes and Mark Down, in 2005 they created Sorrow for Anthony Minghella’s Olivier Award winning Madam Butterfly at the ENO. Crying Out Loud worked with Blind Summit on a piece inspired by the Jack London story Call Of The Wild.

Call Of The Wild  is about finding our true nature and it follows the life of a dog kidnapped into the Yukon Gold Rush at the end of the 19th century. As the dog becomes wilder he is ennobled by the experience, while the men around him descend into increasing depravity, corrupted by their desire for gold.

This adaptation of Call Of The Wild  uses shadows and life-sized puppets to recreate the Artic Tundra onstage and tell this classic tale of adventure and self discovery.

Commissioned and produced by Crying Out Loud. Produced at Webber Douglas Studio,
The Central School of Speech and Drama, London.

Press

  • '…what made the final bill a triumph was the compelling ROH2 commission from Blind Summit Theatre. Exquisite and mysterious, dangerous and also very funny, this is a puppet riff on Jack London’s classic novel The Call of the Wild. There are only two puppets – a man and his dog – and six puppeteers. The dog is a white Siberian husky. His head “lives” on the arm of one puppeteer who is trailed by a second cast member who wags the dog’s fluffy tail. The dog’s body doesn’t exist, but in just a couple of seconds you not only see but feel it. The interaction between this twosome approaches the surreal. The relations between the live performers and the puppets is fascinating and utterly mind-boggling in the ways that they fuse together'

    Allen Robertson, The Times