Guest Blog: Ben Glasstone On Puppets, Nostalgia and BOOK STORY

It always feels foolish to rail against the modern world. We remember our parents and grandparents disapproving of our youthful frolics and fixations - and when our turn comes to be grown-ups, we try to have enough self-awareness not to disapprove too loudly in our turn.

Things change, the young grow old; and we don't want to be the ones standing in the doorway or blocking up the hall (per Bob Dylan). We're rightly suspicious of nostalgia and the complacent habit of harking back to a Golden Age.

But, oddly, of late it feels as though it's the younger generation who are the nostalgic ones. For many kids today the badges of cool are wonky typography, vinyl records and vintage clothes. The cassette tape (of all the emblems of obsolescence) has become an icon of hip. What's going on?

It was thinking about this that got me started on writing Book Story, a family puppet musical all about books. My ten-year-old son had been given a Kindle and (being a logical sort of person) was advocating its superiority over the paper book.

It was hard to argue with its many space- and energy-saving advantages. But instinctively I felt, like so many, a strong preference for and attachment to paper books. Was it just "sentimentality", whatever that means?

My theory (for what it's worth) is that the digital age presents us with a fundamental problem. A computer is, in its principal inventor Alan Turing's phrase, a "Universal Machine." That's to say - it isn't anything. It's whatever you want it to be. Continuously reprogrammed, reconfigured and repurposed.

Which of course makes it infinitely powerful. In our hands, we hold the most flexible and potent tool in history: it's a phone, it's a watch, it's a game, it's a calorie counter...it's whatever you want it to be. But as an object it has no character: it's a shell for content that's built to be upgraded.

Sure, those Apple designers can make it look pretty cool and desirable - but who keeps their old phones and laptops up on a shelf to peruse? Books and other analogue media have, by contrast, a fixed identity and an integrity. Like us, they are limited and their limitations give them character. Like us, they are imperfect; they age.

Change is good. Change is life - and the young, rightly, embrace it. But our world has become super-streamed. Everything changes all the time. And that's really hard to negotiate. We spend our adolescences trying to form an identity; to find values, a "style", a way of being in the world. And when everything changes all the time that becomes hugely challenging.

So the youth (I'd say) are begging for some fixed points. Some simple old-fashioned stuff you can touch and feel and hold; that will still be there next week, next year, to be held and remembered again.

With these thoughts in mind, I made a show about books - in which the leading characters are the books themselves. It uses puppets, the most human and magical of theatrical media: we'll happily believe that a little red book with a little puppet arm, swinging off a library shelf, is real and alive.

It's a magic that we create with our minds and our shared readiness-to-believe, requiring no elaborate special effects to convince us of its "reality". What could be better for our children (or for the children inside all of us) than to share in the moment of live performance, as a company of actors sing, puppeteer and role-hop through a story?

Books hold the stories and the souls of their writers. They are passed on and shared and so we are connected to our past and to each other. And theatre is the most ancient medium of collective storytelling.

Am I sounding a bit nostalgic? Well then, that just proves I'm down with the kids.

Book Story is at Little Angel Theatre 27 September-1 October

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