The Little Devil Theatre made the local news this week. Sixty years open, which is the sort of number local news loves — round enough for a graphic, sentimental enough for a vox pop. Bunting outside. A cake with a wobbly candle in the shape of a six and a zero. An old black-and-white photo of opening night, everyone in it long dead or unrecognisable.
Then they cut to Tashy — the theatre's poster boy, the face they wheel out for exactly this kind of anniversary piece, and fairly enough, since the man has carved and built some genuinely beautiful puppets over the years — sat opposite the reporter, telling the nation that nobody does this anymore. That the craft is dying out. Said with the specific weariness of someone who has said it many times before and expects to say it many times again.
I want to be clear that I don't think he's lying. I think he believes it completely, the way you believe something you've been saying for a decade whether or not the evidence still agrees with you.
There's an exhibition to go with the anniversary, apparently — Tashy opening up the archive, decades of props and photographs and programmes pulled out of storage for people to look at. Which is its own quiet contradiction. You don't curate an archive for a thing that's finished. You curate it because there's still a story being added to.
But it is, structurally, a strange thing to say from inside a building that has just proven the opposite. Sixty years is not a death rattle. Sixty years is a going concern. You don't get bunting for a corpse.
I've heard some version of this speech at every puppet festival I've ever worked, usually from someone older than me, usually delivered with real affection for the art form and real contempt for whoever they think is failing to carry it. It's never actually about the craft dying. It's about a specific version of it — theirs — no longer being the only version in the room.
Meanwhile there are people my age and younger doing this in pub backrooms and Edinburgh Fringe slots and on TikTok, badly funded and mostly unthanked, and none of them made the news, because "thing continues to exist, differently" doesn't have a good enough clip.
Thirteen years in and I've stopped taking the eulogies personally. If it really were dying, nobody would still be bothering to announce it.