Eugene Lambert reflects on his time creating puppet plays for his own theatre and for television.
The Lambert Puppet Theatre, which opened 13 years ago, has recently been renovated and enlarged. Now as well as theatre, there is a museum and a workshop for modelling, construction, painting and dressmaking. The theatre in Monkstown is run by the Lambert family, with family members specialising in different areas.
Eugene Lambert, founding member of the theatre, describes how the new puppet museum came about. The Lambert family home was full of puppets from their own collection, along with donated antique puppets. They needed somewhere to store them and came up with the idea of opening a museum so that the public could see the collection.
Eugene Lambert is best known to the Irish public for playing the character of O'Brien in the RTÉ children's television programme 'Wanderly Wagon'. He began making puppet shows for RTÉ long before Wanderly Wagon came to air. These include 11 episodes of 'Carta Hudai' (1962) and 'Murphy Agus A Chairde' (1963–67). Many of the characters that featured in these programmes are part of the exhibition in the museum.
Eugene Lambert describes how many of the scripts for these productions were written by Paddy O'Neill, with Chris Curran providing the voices for the puppets.
Another production was a series of half hour episodes for 'Brogeen Follows The Magic Tune' (1967), a story written by Patricia Lynch containing over 100 characters. The Lambert family controlled the puppets working to a recorded track with music specially composed and played by the Radio Éireann Orchestra. This programme brought the Lambert work to an international audience as it was broadcast in Norway, Sweden and Poland.
In parallel with making the television shows, the family were developing their own puppet theatre, which began as a travelling venture before establishing their own theatre space in Monkstown, Dublin. The family were supported by Micheál Mac Liammóir and Hilton Edwards, who both provided the voices for a production of 'Alice in Wonderland'. All the characters are now on view in the museum.
Micheál Mac Liammóir played the Cheshire Cat and Hilton played the caterpillar.
Eugene Lambert believes that there is a growing appreciation for puppets throughout Ireland.
This episode of 'Anything Goes' was broadcast on 7 December 1985. The presenter is Mary Fitzgerald.
