“The idea for this show developed while we were working on a version of Pinocchio,” Peter recalled, “In the original book, Pinocchio kills the cricket on page six. Since that show was for a younger audience, we were advised to leave out the killing of the cricket, like in the Disney version, but we decided that no, we really wanted it to stay. Anyway, it ended up being one of the best moments of the show, with the strongest reaction, right across the board, from adults as well as kids. Although,” he mused, “the adult audiences reacted differently when there weren’t many kids there, they were less restrained, almost as though they were intimidated by the kids.” Inspired by the potency of that moment, the group played with various ways of building a show around its essential energy, and the final result was a series of puppet death scenes. Springing from such a child-approved source, it’s clearly not the death that makes this an adult show. “Our shows for younger audiences don’t talk down to kids. We strive to create situations that kids and adults can understand together. The best reactions come when adults are responding from a child-like state, and when kids can respond from an adult-like understanding of what’s going on. If this show isn’t for children, it’s not because we don’t think children can handle it (though the under-six age group would be terrified by some of it). It’s because puppetry [in North America] is just emerging from a kids-only pigeonhole, and we’d like it to be understood that our work is for a sophisticated audience.”