How I create… with puppeteer Toby Olié

Since the age of six Olié has been passionate about puppetry and what began as a childhood hobby has now blossomed into a much-heralded career.

War Horse is where Olié’s professional puppetry began, moving from puppeteer to associate puppetry director during a four-year run with the hit before moving on to co-director 2013’s The Elephantom with Finn Caldwell. And he’s not looked back since, challenging what is possible in puppetry, and turning his hand (quite literally) to musicals, opera and dance all via a remarkable range of creative and compelling characters.

Olié’s notable works include Spirited Away (at Tokyo’s Imperial Theatre), Pinocchio (the National Theatre), The Four Seasons: A Reimagining (Shakespeare’s Globe) and Disney’s The Little Mermaid, which ran in Tokyo, Moscow and the Netherlands. In February 2025 he brought his latest project, an adaptation of Ross Collins’ popular children’s book There’s a Bear on My Chair, to the Southbank Centre as part of our Imagine Festival.

When and where do you find yourself at your most creative?

I’m lucky because working in puppetry I am involved throughout the design, construction and directing parts of the process, so I get to feel different kinds of creativity at different times. But overall I love the research and development stage. This is when you’re devising and testing ideas for a show prior to rehearsals, or sometimes in order to get a project commissioned, and you create things quickly and roughly out of cardboard and reclaimed materials. I always aim to explore and stage as much as possible; often you can end up with the entire show made in cardboard form, essentially making a first draft from which the more refined or intricate ideas can take shape.

How do you know when an idea is worth developing into something more?

I think it’s when I can see the seeds of initial ideas on stage in my head. This usually means there’s exciting potential; either in the challenge of staging something that feels ‘unstageable’, or the detailed exploration and investment in a relatively straightforward idea for a prolonged amount of stage time. With puppetry you’re constantly balancing physical action and aesthetic, so if an idea doesn’t spark my interest or curiosity in one of these categories I trust my gut and keep looking.

Which tools are key to your creative process?

Humour. I feel very lucky to have made a career out of my greatest passion, one that started out as a childhood hobby. So I always prioritise the comfort and familiarity that comes with a good sense of humour between colleagues – not at the expense of hard work or focus, but people definitely create their best work when they’re at ease.

Collaboration. Any beautiful puppet or piece of puppetry is the collaboration of at least a handful of artists if not more, so maintaining a strong sense of collaboration throughout the design, making and performance processes is essential. Each process has a knock on to the others, so maintaining a healthy flow of ideas and skills sharing is essential.

Who are you creating your work for, and how free are you to create the work you want to create?

I strive to make work that appeals to anybody, of any age on some level. The film studio Pixar strikes such a great balance of creating stories and characters that appeal to you whether you’re a child or an adult, and I believe puppetry, much like animation, has a unique ability to engage multiple generations. Even the simplest of stories can be emotive and affecting if told in an engaging and expressive way.

What do you do when you hit a wall; when you feel unmotivated or uninspired? How do you overcome this?

I have two very contrasting methods I employ when I hit a creative block. The first is to go back to the basic premise, narrative, intention or seed of an idea and almost strip everything away to see what essential elements are required or missing to proceed further. With puppetry, less is always more, so sometimes scaling back can provide valuable insight.

By contrast my other method is simply to skip the thing that’s causing me trouble (whether that is rehearsing a particular scene, designing a character or writing a funding application) and work through everything else that I have a solution or idea for. Then (usually) these other completed aspects provide the context, answer or stimulus for what was tripping me up.

Is there a piece of advice you’ve received that you often find yourself returning to?

There are two pieces of advice that I was given while training in puppetry that I regularly think back to. The first is ‘don’t sacrifice movement for aesthetic’, meaning that a puppet’s primary form of communication is its physicality and motion. While its appearance can communicate who or what the character is, movement portrays a puppet’s emotions and intentions and it’s these elements that an audience connects with, relates to and ultimately believes in. So when designing and making a puppet I prioritise both joints and materials that will give the character the maximum potential for movement and therefore expression.

The second bit of advice I received was ‘less is more’. All theatre requires the audience to imaginatively believe in what they’re seeing as a reality, but puppets particularly require the audience to be complicit in their performance, as they have to be seen to be alive before they can ‘act’ or play their character as an actor does. Therefore in both design and performance style, I always try and find ways for the audience’s imagination to help fill in the gaps, as by applying their own understanding, experience and interpretation of the puppet they are connecting with it and imbuing it with their own reality and will therefore be even more invested in it as a living being.