Strings Attached

My name is Caliban. You might know me from the Shakespearean masterpiece The Tempest. In fact, I was made for a marionette production of the play by a man named Arnold Goodwin in about 1939. We toured the country in the 1940s and 1950s with his puppet theatre troupe. Those were the days! Later on we were bought by the New Zealand Puppet Theatre – along with the glove puppets, which were part of another troupe – and we kept performing. Then some curator came along and classified us as museum pieces. No more limelight, no more applause. We were retired, our glory days over, put on the shelf – literally. Some of my old crew are up in the Wild Child gallery – but what can they do? You can’t have The Tempest without Caliban, can you? Well, maybe I could whip this motley crew into shape ... it feels good to be centre stage again, I have to say.