The Timișoara Puppet Theatre

The puppet theatre on Strada Miron Costin has been a fixture since 1956. Its 120-seat house fills for a 45-minute Pushkin tale, while backstage puppeteers earn average wages and patch the roof.

The puppet theatre on Strada Miron Costin sits behind a blue gate in a courtyard off the main drag. It has been there since 1956, which makes it older than most of the audience. Inside, the foyer smells of varnish and raincoats. A staff member sells tickets from a booth the size of a confessional. The house holds 120, and on a Sunday morning in March it was two-thirds full, mostly children under seven and their parents.

The performance was 'The Story of a Golden Fish,' after Pushkin. It ran 45 minutes without an interval. The puppeteers worked behind a black curtain, but their hands were visible below the screen — gloved, twisting rods, lifting strings. The children did not mind. They watched the fish leap, the old man weep, the sea turn black. When the fish finally spoke, a boy in the front row shouted, 'She's behind the curtain!' His mother shushed him. He was right, but it did not spoil anything.

A theatre, not a nursery

The Timișoara Puppet Theatre — Teatrul de Păpuși — is a public institution funded by the city and the county. It employs 18 people: 10 puppeteers, 3 technicians, 2 administrators, 2 builders, and a director. Most of the puppeteers trained at the theatre academy in Târgu Mureș or at UNATC in Bucharest. They are not volunteers. They earn between 2,800 and 4,200 lei a month before tax, depending on seniority. That is roughly the average wage in Timișoara, where a two-room flat rents for 350–450 euros plus utilities. None of them do it for the money.

The theatre produces four to five new shows a year, plus revivals. It tours to schools and kindergartens in the Banat, and occasionally abroad — to Hungary, Serbia, and once to Japan, in 2018. The current repertoire includes 'Snow White,' 'The Little Prince,' and a wordless show for toddlers called 'Hush.' The ticket price is 15 lei for children, 25 lei for adults. On Sundays there are two performances, at 11am and 1pm. Tickets sell out a week in advance for the popular titles.

You cannot hide behind a puppet. The children see your wrist shake. They know.

I spoke to Ana, a puppeteer with 14 years at the theatre. She was manipulating the old man in the Pushkin show — a rod puppet with a papier-mâché head and a cloth body. 'The weight is in the arm,' she said. 'You hold the main rod in your right hand, the head rod in your left. After 20 minutes your shoulders burn. In a three-character scene, you learn to switch hands without dropping the puppet.' She has a permanent callus on her right index finger. She showed me. It looked like a small stone.

The puppets themselves are made in a workshop on the same corridor. Two builders work there full-time, carving from lime wood and moulding heads in papier-mâché. A marionette takes three to four weeks to complete. A rod puppet takes two. The materials are cheap — wood, glue, fabric, paint — but the labour is not. A single marionette can cost 1,500 lei in materials and 40 hours of work. The theatre reuses what it can. In the storage room, shelves are stacked with heads and limbs from shows that closed years ago. 'We are hoarders,' said the head builder, a man in his sixties who has been there since 1989. 'You never know when a king's head will be useful again.'

What the audience does not see

The puppeteers work in a space that is hot in summer and cold in winter. The building is old and the heating is uneven. In January, during a cold snap, the temperature backstage dropped to 14 degrees Celsius. The puppeteers wore fingerless gloves. The show went on. 'The children do not care about our comfort,' said Ana. 'They care about the fish.' The theatre has applied for EU funding to renovate the building, but the process is slow. In the meantime, they patch the roof and paint the walls every few years.

The audience sees none of this. They see a clean stage, a lit screen, a story. They see the puppets move as if alive. What they do not see is the choreography of the puppeteers — the way three people share a single rod, the way a hand disappears behind a prop, the way a whisper cues the next line. 'It is like a swan,' said Ana. 'On the surface, calm. Underneath, paddling like mad.'

The theatre also runs a small museum of puppets in the foyer. It is free to enter. There are marionettes from the 1960s, with faded paint and chipped noses. There is a dragon from a 1974 production of 'The Dragon' by Evgeny Schwartz, its jaws still hinged. School groups visit. The curator is also the ticket seller. She says the children always ask the same question: 'Do they come alive at night?' She tells them the truth: 'No. They are wood and cloth. But we take them out and make them alive every day.'

After the Sunday show, the puppeteers came out to meet the audience. The children touched the golden fish — a cloth puppet with a wooden mouth — and asked if it could swim. Ana said yes, in the story. A girl asked if the fish was real. Ana said, 'She is real here,' and tapped her chest. The girl nodded. Her mother looked relieved. The puppeteers went backstage to change. The next show was at 1pm. They had 20 minutes.

A craft under pressure

The theatre faces the same pressures as other cultural institutions in Romania. Audiences are ageing, except for children's shows. Funding is tight. The puppeteers are not well paid. But they keep working because the work is specific and the audience is immediate. 'You cannot fake it with children,' said one puppeteer who asked not to be named. 'They will tell you if you are boring. That is a good discipline.'

The theatre has no understudy system. If a puppeteer is sick, someone else learns the part in a morning. The shows are short and the cues are physical, so it is possible. But it is not ideal. 'We are a small team,' said the director, who has been in the post for six years. 'We cannot afford to double-cast. We rely on everyone being here.' In 2020, during the pandemic, the theatre closed for eight months. The puppeteers were furloughed at 75% of salary. They made puppet videos for online shows. It kept the audience connected, but it was not the same. 'The screen flattens everything,' said Ana. 'A puppet needs air between it and the audience.'

The theatre's next premiere is in May, a new adaptation of 'The Wizard of Oz.' The builders are working on a tin man with a movable jaw and a scarecrow with detachable limbs. The puppeteers are learning to walk on a raised platform that simulates the yellow brick road. Rehearsals are three hours a day, four days a week, for six weeks. The show will run for two months, then go on tour to Lugoj and Reșița. After that, it will enter the repertoire and be performed a few times a year until the puppets wear out.

I asked Ana if she would do anything else. She laughed. 'I have a degree in puppetry. What else would I do?' She said she had once tried an office job for six months. 'I missed the smell of the glue. I missed the children's faces. I missed the moment when the puppet takes over and you are not thinking about your hands anymore.' That moment, she said, is why she stays. It does not happen every show. But when it does, the puppet is alive, and so is she.