Alain Lecucq

Trained at John and Lyndie Wright’s Little Angel Theatre of London, Alain Lecucq establishes the shadow theatre company, La Citrouille, with Annie Bizeau in 1970s. He is simultaneously very attracted to paper theatre which he discovers through George Speaight, one evening at the Little Angel Theatre. He starts buying reproductions and gradually shifts to purchasing original sheets of paper theatre. He does not leave the habit of hunting at prints dealers’ affairs and secondhand markets and that is how he becomes the owner of a large paper theatre collection.

After starting to perform with these “historic” theatres, he begins thinking about the adaptation of this technique for contemporary stage production, keeping its two most important characteristics, cardboard and flat form, as unchangeable rules for his future work.

Working with contemporary authors including Michel Deutsch, Matei Visniec, Mohamed Kacimi, Howard Barker, and Orhan Pamuk will allow him to affirm the fruitful exchange between present day literature and a renewed technique which also finds its right place at the heart of puppetry.

However, choosing paper theatre technique as his artistic expression does not keep him away from his everlasting passion for the very diverse world of puppetry to which he devoted several years of volunteer work as the secretary and later the president of Themaa, association of puppetry and related arts in France.