Jake Mace
Sincerity and frolic flow through the theatrical architecture of Mamoru Iriguchi’s experimental devised puppetry piece Size Matters. Following two humans and their puppeteer doppelgangers through a journey across time, physics, language and being, we see a pair of ‘parasitical’ beings emerge into the world and grow massively out of proportion in comparison to their hosts. Iriguchi’s expert class in puppeteering falls short on offering much other than levity, and leans too heavily on its own narrative crutches, avoiding creating a lasting impact.
The personal (and physical) growth of all four individuals is portrayed by Iriguchi and collaborator Julia Darrouy, who each play big and small versions of the characters Sunshine and Tangerine, across an emotive journey exploring life, sex, birth, death, and many moments in between. This is all situated in a fourth-wall smashing framing presented initially by a puppet narrator manoeuvred by Gavin Pringle, who soon arrives to offer our disoriented characters a masterclass in performing puppetry, with the aim of relieving them of their misguided concerns and towards a great and unexpected live performance.
Big questions are at the crux of the piece – when we grow beyond our surroundings, how do we stay in touch with the very things that make us feel human? When biological boundaries drift and augment, what keeps us tethered together as conscious beings? That being said, little questions are presented as important here too – how do our voices carry to one another spatially in such a context, and how do the way we control our bodies and the bodies of those around us reflect on our muscle memory?
The concept is delivered just as avant-garde as the above description makes it sound, but too often throughout Iriguchi’s text clings onto a need to explain its quirkiness as matter-of-fact to the audience. As we watch these characters grow and shrink in size, there seems little point in hearing the exact metre-length that they have grown to deliberated to us, nor what we have just witnessed physically then recounted in the dialogue. Too often, Iriguchi and Darrouy tell rather than show, and the piece’s meta nature, including announcing the start of each new scene, lacks a sense of narrative cohesion.
In its first act, the show sets up a clever undoing of its own structure. The sizes we have seen our characters grow to are then used against them in recreations of what we have witnessed already but in different form. But the outcome ends up feeling shallow. Perception is at the heart of the plot, as we are told time and time again, but our perception as an audience barely shifts beyond what we are told we are supposed to be seeing. As a result, there’s little to take inference from that might hit a little deeper, or with more pertinence.
If time travel, shape-shifting, and entropy are all a part of a plot, the audience is owed an internal logic to be established by the performers, and then to be followed, if there’s to be any investment from the onlooker. In this case, it feels like the show wants those elements to be free and loose, while the delivery of the text is overly rigid. These dichotomies clash against one another dramaturgically, and push the audience away from greater meaning that could have been unpacked within the show’s broad themes.
Size Matters is also hit off-kilter by undeveloped characterisation in the presence of the Narrator. Once the curtain drops and he emerges beyond a miniaturised puppet version of himself, the absurd humour that is well established in the opening moments of the piece begins to slowly feel more and more like a series of in-jokes. In-jokes to which our perception and understanding as an audience is restricted, even in the context of satire.
While the visual elements of this piece deliver delight, whimsy and fun in their exploration of scale, the rest of the piece chooses to scale down, somehow both from clarity and equally from zaniness, finding itself more often than not in an underdeveloped middle.
Recommended Drink: If you’re scaling up to Blue Whale size, better get used to glugging down some water!
Performances of Size Matters have now concluded at Manipulate Festival 2026.
Elisabeth Flett
