They never expected the shows to go viral. The first one, eight minutes long, took six hours to film. “I don’t know how to edit,” Nicholson admits. Photograph: Ian NicholsonĮach of the online shows was filmed in one dramatic take – a decision born out of necessity. Sam Wilde making puppets for I Want My Hat Back. A bike shop that had opened down the road was throwing out cardboard boxes the bear’s eyes were beads swiped from one of his daughter’s necklaces. The set of the first one just about fits into a shoebox, and was made from what Wilde had to hand. “I can’t stress how tiny everything was,” says Nicholson, who performed and directed the shows kneeling behind his kitchen table. The trilogy went viral and is now transferring – with bigger puppets, new actors and a good deal more cardboard – to the Little Angel theatre in London. “Even if that just lasted 15 minutes, that’s something I will always be proud of.” In the lockdown of spring 2020, Wilde and director Ian Nicholson created homemade online productions of Jon Klassen’s trilogy of subversive children’s picture books, starting with I Want My Hat Back, in which a ponderous bear searches for his missing pointy red hat. ‘W e made nearly half a million kids happy with a cardboard box,” says set designer Sam Wilde.
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