The Depraved Appetite of Tarrare the Freak

True to the slow-cooking nature of puppetry, Bristol’s Wattle & Daub first showcased Tarrare back in 2015 to sell-out audiences as part of the Bristol Festival of Puppetry. The show is currently on a tour that takes in London’s amazing Wilton’s Music Hall, a venue that will complement the darkly gothic nature of its subject matter. For The Depraved Appetite of Tarrare the Freak is richly loaded with macabre detail, the true facts of which not only beggar belief but will fascinate and horrify anyone with an unhealthy curiosity in the grim yet colourful history of pathological freakdom.  

Billed as a ‘monstrous chamber opera for puppets’, Tarrare is based on the true story of an 18th century Parisian circus freak with an insatiable appetite for swallowing snakes, cats, raw offal, amputated limbs and even (allegedly, though you will have swallowed the idea by the end of the show) a baby, and who went on to be enlisted as a spy for the French Revolution (which he was much less good at than swallowing stuff). As with the current state of world politics, the truth is so outlandish that you couldn’t have made it up unless you’d dropped a large tab of brown acid followed by a desiccated pineal gland chaser.

Puppetry offers the perfect vehicle for demonstrating Tarrare’s extraordinary swallowing feats, and his expressively tragic torso-puppet is masterfully deployed in the hands of Tobi Poster. Indeed, puppet and manipulator are so symbiotic that the acts of swallowing and regurgitation are not for the faint-hearted. The real Tarrare was reputed to suffer from “a foul body odour, stinking to such a degree that he could not be endured within the distance of twenty paces”, though Wattle & Daub wisely stick to visuals and don’t go in for any olfactory special effects. 

The libretto is strong, though the music is more operetta than opera and the melodies and sung parts feel a little West End/Les Mis in the first half. It’s an ambitious project and one that doesn’t come off completely, with the music, and sheer number of puppeteers and singers coming and going in a workmanlike way, threatening to overpower the puppetry itself.

The puppet of the Siamese twin sisters had the odd feature of allowing one sister’s head to detach and wander round the stage in order to have more intimate conversations and songs with her love interest, Tarrare. This seemed to miss a trick in puppet design, where forcing her twin to come with her at all times could have resulted in a far more grotesque and portable tiny parasitic twin who might have sprouted from, say, her sister’s shoulder…

But even thinking about this is probably a side-effect of having seen Tarrare the Freak, as it is guaranteed to send your mind down myriad dark and strange alleyways of imaginings, haunt your dreams and put you right off swallowing live cats, babies and amputated limbs forever. Go and see it if you dare.

The Depraved Appetite of Tarrare the Freak finishes at Tobacco Factory Theatres tonight, Saturday, January 28. For more info and to book tickets, visit www.tobaccofactorytheatres.com/shows/depraved-appetite-tarrare-freak