Researching Punch & Judy Shows
It is interesting to see the variations of the same puppet show. Though there are hundreds of puppeteers performing Punch and Judy all over the world, they are all different yet someone, in essence, the same. It is amazing to see how one show can be interpreted in so many ways and still maintain its originality.
Punch and Judy was based on Commedia dell arte, so I decided to keep researching the history of the theatre-style. I found that each show was different, because there was no script to follow. The performers would improvise around a theme or topic, often making it comedic and lewd. This was totally politically incorrect by today's standards! The performers would flaunt authority and mock nobility.
Finding out about Joan was fascinating to me, considering I never had an interest in history before. It was exciting to be learning something new that I was actually interested in.
My story looks at the story of Punch and Judy from the perspective of Joan herself. She'd be outraged by the way society today perceives her shows; Joan's shows are about her family and friends, her loved ones! Why are they so much against her? More to the point how could she be outraged today, if she was over 450 years of age?
She would have had to have been born long before Samuel Pepys even wrote about Punch and Judy on May 9th, 1662. My eldest son posed the question: how could this come about?
Is she an old retired puppeteer
who has lost her mind? Has the puppeteer got dementia and believes herself to be Judy? Is it that she's a schizophrenic who has become obsessed that she is Judy? NO! I didn’t want MY Joan to be a sick old lady. She had to be strong, confident, resilient... a survivor of all that life has
thrown at her over the years! She would be the one to tell her own story.
It was while pondering the dilemma that my eldest son set for me that my youngest son asked if I'd heard about Nicholas Flamel and the elixir of immortality? Like many, I'd only heard of him through the Harry Potter books by JK Rowling, but apparently he had been a real person. So from researching Punch and Judy shows, to Commedia dell arte I was now off on a new line of research, that of Nicholas Flamel. According to my son, Nicholas Flamel was a French philanthropist, who donated much of his wealth to hospitals and charities. He also happened to be an alchemist who discovered the Philosopher’s Stone, which supposedly could turn any metal into gold. And as if that wasn’t enough, he was also said to have found the elixir of immortality. Now I was really interested!
