Creator: Les Anges au Plafond
French puppetry group Les Anges au Plafond (Angels on the Ceiling) are making its UK debut, and it’s extraordinary. The founders of Les Anges, Camille Trouvé and Brice Berthoud, have co-directed the Centre National Dramatique de Normandie since 2021. Their work is powerfully inventive. Seeing this highly original show in a tiny basement theatre under a bookshop in Hampstead is like diving into a pool and finding yourself in the ocean. Indeed, one of many mesmerising scenes of Le Cri Quotidien (The Daily Scream) atmospherically recreates the Mediterranean with pop-up papier-mâché waves and pelagic playing from cellist Sandrine Lefebvre.
Le Cri Quotidien deals with the horror of reading a daily paper: militaristic politicians, drownings, oil spills, mass murders, factory farming. But it’s also funny and hugely innovative. There are chicken noises, visual pop-up jokes, and whole cities growing out of the pages in front of our eyes. The small-scale puppetry of Le Cri Quotidien premiered in 2000 and was Trouvé’s first show. At the heart of this brimming 35-minute miracle is the same multi-layered artefact as 26 years ago: a huge and artfully-constructed “newspaper”. Full of richly inventive pop-up scenes, this playful mini-stage acquires depth, patina and fragility with each outing.
Scenic creator and performer Camille Trouvé plays an everyday consumer of news. She sits and reads the paper, casually eating sunflower seeds and spitting out the shells as she encounters tales of death and destruction. At the same time, a cellist is playing at a nearby table. Each woman seems immersed in a world of her own, but the cello provides a varied soundtrack for the reader’s media-driven voyage: Ode to Joy underscores the politicians, plucking represents the pecking chickens, clever bowing sketches the sounds of fast and slow cars or mimics the microtones of Algerian music for a story set in a spinning desert of Arabic newsprint.
The oceanic scene recreates the farcical tragedy of the Costa Concordia, whose captain deserted after sinking his ship. It involves a characteristically complex combination of elements. Scenic creator and performer Camille Trouvé gives voice to both Captain Francesco and the dancer he was flirting with as the huge vessel foundered. She also manipulates a model cruise ship so that it sinks Titanic-style, via shadow play, into the painted waves. After all these global dramas, there are the pages of puzzle and weather, satirising the modern media landscape’s mind-scrambling juxtapositions.
Hampstead’s Well Walk Theatre may be small, but it’s an ideal venue for this intimate show. The beautifully built venue in a former grocery won Theatre Building of the Year 2025 at the Stage Awards just months after it opened. The ground floor contains a welcoming cafe and kids’ bookshop, while the elegant, Edwardian-style basement theatre stages family-friendly puppetry, magic shows and mimes.
Le Cri Quotidien is running French and English performances. It’s quite possible for Anglophone audiences to enjoy the French shows because this is not primarily script-based theatre. Les Anges au Plafond have invented an original and creative interdisciplinary artform, mixing text with body language, sound, music and materiality into an extraordinary show. Their fusion of puppetry, shadow play, paper art and live music is distinctive and magical.
Runs until April 19 2026
