^{Cover Image: L-R: SPPT Chair David Mofflin, SPPT Executive Director Katie Henebery, incoming SPPT Artistic Director Iain Grandage, current SPPT Artistic Director Philip Mitchell. Image by Ezra Alcantra.}

“I’d hate to presume I know the intricacies of puppetry – I’ve never built a puppet other than a sock puppet in my life,” declares Iain Grandage, the man who is about to take up the artistic director role at Spare Parts Puppet Theatre.

If it were any other candidate for the job, that might be a mildly alarming declaration. But anyone who knows Grandage well recognises the humble approach of a multi-talented musician, composer, ex-Perth Festival director and general all-round talent.

He’s got ideas for Spare Parts, of course, but he’s signalling from the start a different entry point from that of retiring artistic director and eminent puppet master Philip Mitchell, whom Grandage deeply admires for his visionary two decades at the helm. “I love the care that everybody expresses for this company and that is due in no small part to how Philip has tended to it,” he tells Seesaw. “I’m consistently aware of the fact that I’m being offered a very beautiful and high functioning company to tend to.”

What Grandage hopes is to “open up the possibility of many people directing”, a form of “‘collegial artistic leadership” at the company. “The thing I know is that I don’t know a lot of things,” he explains. “And so therefore, it’s about making sure that I listen to those aspects of puppetry, manipulation or construction, or design or philosophy, just as I did at the Perth Festival with the Noongar Advisory Circle. You have to find people who you trust and can listen to deeply.”

Grandage – who formally starts work in October – has in fact had a long association with both Spare Parts and its puppetry, starting as a composer for Midnight Gang in 2003 with legendary puppeteer and director Noriko Nishimoto, and most recently The Whale in 2024. This large-scale event toured interstate, attracting high praise for both the ten-metre whale marionette and the evocative musical score that Grandage co-wrote with his cellist, singer and songwriter partner Melanie Robinson. “It was my engagement with The Whale that made me a known quality who had contributed to the company,” he says. 

Of course, Grandage has been a “known quality” at Spare Parts for far longer. He laughs at the memory of working with Nishimoto, who died in 2016. “We were doing this collaboration, and I was kind of offering all these ideas, perhaps over-participating a little. Then one day I went into the Spare Parts’ theatre and Noriko turned around and went, ‘Iain, thank you so much for your offers, for being here today. But for you, today is a special “shut up” day.’

“I was initially quite insulted, and then I just went and played golf with my dad, and it was lovely. It kind of summed up Noriko in a very beautiful way, (her) going ‘I just need some quiet time to ponder the artistry of how to give life to inanimate objects.’”

Spare Parts’ fertile partnership with renowned author and artist Shaun Tan is certain to flourish under Grandage’s leadership, as it did under Mitchell. Among many puppet adaptations of Tan’s books – The Arrival, Tales from Outer Suburbia, Rules of Summer, and Aqua Sapiens – was Hometown, a girl-meets-alien boy musical composed by Robinson with input from Grandage. It was the company’s first musical that had patrons walking out of the theatre humming Robinson’s catchy ballads.

Grandage says he and Shaun Tan have another project in mind for one of Tan’s award-winning books (title as yet secret). He describes his relationship with the Perth-raised, Melbourne-based Tan as “a fertile and trusting relationship” that he hopes to draw on in the new job.

Grandage spent five years at the helm of the Perth Festival and loved it. Most recently, he accepted a curatorial role at the Melbourne Recital Centre. So why has he accepted a job with a small, niche company like Spare Parts?

“When I was in the midst of various moments in the festival and at the MRC, the thing I missed the most was being in a room of creatives, dreaming up the best way to tell a story,” he responds. “Now, I’ll be much closer to that act of creation.”

“I’m less interested in the singular act of creativity like being a composer of an orchestral work. I find that too isolating, but the act of collective creation means there’s a whole pile of people that you’re bouncing ideas off.” He will retain a “much reduced role” at MRC. “It’ll be curatorial oversight and caring for First Nations artists and some classical programming,” he says.

So, what does Grandage make of Spare Parts’ split location – the original (but since 2022 unusable) theatre space, and ongoing administration office and puppet museum in Short Street in Fremantle, and the refurbished performance space in the Claremont Showgrounds?

“I fell in love with Short Street’s puppet museum and the series of community-focussed playtime events that are still inside the old part of the building,” he says. “I’ll look to continue that presence as much as we are able, because there’s something about coming out of the Fremantle train station and it being right there. Spare Parts is very much part of the heartbeat of what people expect from Fremantle. It’s got a long history of being a harbour for artists and creativity. And so that feels integral.”

But he also appreciates the WA government’s investment in a performing space inside the Claremont Showgrounds. “I see the showgrounds as an amazingly egalitarian space, and I want to look at what we can do during the Royal Show so that we are a celebrated part of it. We could also have a relationship with other shows, everything from the Ord Valley Muster to bicentenary celebrations in Albany, or the World Masters Games.”

 Social connection is a natural antidote to the current politics of division, he says.

“The danger is we all get isolated into a relationship with a screen and that’s it. But when you’re actually standing alongside a stranger and you’re appreciating something together – well, I think we’re pining for that kind of interaction.”

He says the landscape of puppetry fills him with excitement. “Not only will I be looking to drive the ‘in theatre’ experiences, but the ‘out of theatre’ public experiences. People may not have the means to go to the theatre for economic or geographical reasons, so you can bring puppets into public parks and they become a focus of community celebration.

 “Puppets become a reason to come together with people from your street, or your suburb or people from your cultural background – you have a story that joins you.”

Spare Parts Puppet Theatre