Advance ticket sales for My Neighbour Totoro, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s current production running till mid-January, beat all Barbican box-office records. I went on a rainy weekday evening last month, and the place was heaving with Hayao Miyazaki fans of all ages, lots of them clutching furry Totoros they’d bought in the theatre shop.

It’s an impressive, dreamlike production, set in rural Japan after the second world war, and another triumph for the art of puppetry. Totoro himself is huge and cuddly, with an enormous round tummy and inane grin when he bares his teeth. There’s a whole puppeteer inside his pink tongue, as well as three or four more inside his body, which gives you a sense of the scale of him. Among the other puppets, including insects, hens and a smiling goat, is a vast yellow inflatable cat-bus, wafted round the stage by black-clad puppeteers in beekeeper veils who scuttle alongside the human actors.

This is today’s puppetry: as unembarrassed to show its working as the Pompidou Centre is to show its piping. War Horse, which began the puppeting renaissance 15 years ago, proved the power of optical illusion: if a puppet is manipulated with enough skill and empathy, we’re captivated and convinced by its aliveness and hardly notice the camouflaged operators behind or inside it. A skilled puppeteer can express the twitchiness, shyness and solemnity of an animal with one remote-control twitch of its ear or one up-and-down movement to convey its nervous breathing.

All contemporary puppeteers thank War Horse, and in particular the Handspring Puppet Company of South Africa who designed Joey the horse to be so affectingly lifelike, for helping to bring their art into the foreground of public consciousness. ‘It was a turning point,’ says long-time puppeteer Ronnie le Drew. ‘And it’s wonderful. It has been a long struggle for puppetry to gain an independence for itself.’ Since that play (now seen by seven million people), puppetry has become an integral element in a host of theatrical productions. We’ve rediscovered the uncanny ability of inanimate hand-held objects with faces to come alive on stage and make us care desperately about them – and not only as animals.

From the illegitimate child in Anthony Minghella’s Madame Butterfly at ENO to the evil bankers in Joe Wright’s A Season in the Congo at the Young Vic, to the extraordinarily compelling figure of Little Amal, the 3.5 metre-tall puppet who ‘walked’ from Syria to Europe in 2021, highlighting the plight of refugees, the puppet is very much alive and well.

That is, the table-top puppet, and the rod-operated puppet, and the Totoro-style puppet with operators inside it, are alive and well. But before we rejoice too much about puppetry’s renaissance, please can we consider the other vital and perhaps most emotionally engaging kind of puppet of all, which is still critically endangered? That is the marionette.

‘Ah, the marionette!’ you might sneer, remembering how Andy Pandy and Teddy waggled their legs in such a ridiculous way. And as for Stingray and Thunderbirds… they might have been cult programmes, but the puppeteering was primitive. (You can watch the 1960s operators on YouTube, manipulating it all from a bridge above.)

Actually, at its best, the marionette is perhaps the most enchanting kind of puppet of all, and requires more skill to operate than do the rod or table-top or man-standing-behind kinds, brilliant though those can be. Followers of the genre will tell you that the 2004 production of Venus and Adonis at the Little Angel Theatre in Islington and at the Other Place in Stratford, in conjunction with the RSC, was another seminal moment for puppetry, because it was so astonishingly affecting, not only for children but for adults. And no humans were visible at all.

There are only five puppet theatres in Britain that have a marionette-enabling bridge above the stage: the Little Angel, the Puppet Barge in Maida Vale, the Norwich Puppet Theatre, the Harlequin Puppet Theatre in Rhos-on-Sea, Wales, and the Upfront Theatre near Penrith. The Little Angel’s bridge is totally out of use at the moment. All its shows are currently operated by visible puppeteers. Ronnie le Drew (who trained at the Little Angel in the marionette days under its great founder John Wright) is delighted to tell me that this Christmas, he’s an operator in Norwich Puppet Theatre’s Cinderella, where marionettes are being used again after years without them. It costs more to run a marionette show, he explains, because you need more operators, and not many people know how to do it.

Go and see Little Red Riding Hood on the Puppet Barge and you’ll be reminded of the enchanting atmosphere that a well-lit marionette show can produce in the best hands. In a world of CGI, it’s deeply refreshing to see what can be done before your eyes by the hidden mechanics of marionette puppetry. These skills are passed down through families, and to get good at it you really have to start doing it in childhood, like playing the cello. Gren and Juliet Middleton opened the Puppet Barge in Little Venice in 1982, and it’s now run by their daughter Kate Middleton with her son Stan, one of the puppeteers. In 2023 they’re planning to chug the barge along the Thames to Abingdon and put on some shows there.

The other great puppeteering family is the Wright family. There Lyndie Wright still is, every day, chiselling away in her studio layered with the patina and glue of decades of puppet-making, ever since she and her husband bought a roofless temperance building, with studio and cottage attached, in Dagmar Passage, Islington, 61 years ago. She is keeping the art of marionette-making alive. Her film-director son Joe Wright uses puppetry in his movies, and her daughter Sarah Wright, also a highly skilled puppeteer, started the Curious School of Puppetry five years ago, which runs for eight intensive weeks and is heavily oversubscribed. ‘There’s a hunger to learn this art,’ she tells me.

‘My dream,’ Sarah Wright says, ‘would be to get back on to the bridge at the Little Angel with some of the people I’ve trained.’ Next summer she’ll be at the Minack Theatre in Cornwall doing Calvino Nights: three stories by Italo Calvino, involving all kinds of puppets including marionettes, which ‘are quite hard to manipulate in the wind’. Much though I admire the new generation of rod-puppeteers, I’m in awe of the nine-string operators of these delicate wooden figures – puppets whose souls seem to have been chiselled into them by their makers.

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