Brocks Mill

‘Please don’t do that. Address anything difficult to a stuffed animal.’

Forty years ago, Bluebell Studios was the heartbeat to a nation’s childhood, the home-workshop where Bernard painstakingly animated the inanimate, bringing iconic children’s television to life, frame by careful frame. His wife Annie sewed the costumes – waistcoats for badgers, a hat for Mirabel the tortoise – while their daughter May played out in the sunshine.

Or maybe that’s just how Bernard remembers it.

These days, the workshop is a mausoleum to his career in make-believe. In the rafters, a homespun puppet slumps in enforced hibernation. Shelves are stuffed with armatures, old scripts, boxes, dusty books, models. Bernard’s alone, his life in aspic – but soon, the past will have to be unpacked. Because May is all grown up, and she has questions.

A reckoning is coming.

Former Artistic Director and Chief Executive of the National Theatre, Rufus Norris directs RSC Writer-in-Residence Stewart Pringle’s acutely observed, poignant new family drama in The Other Place. A homage to the craft of stop-motion film-making and an exploration of the corrosive power of nostalgia, with animation by award-winning stop-motion animator Astrid Goldsmith, Brock’s Mill investigates the ownership of memory and the importance of being present.