JOHN MCCORMICK

John McCormick (b.1938) has been making and performing with puppets from the age of 5. He made his acting debut as the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland with his mother’s Children’s Theatre Company in 1949. As a university student he had a 40-seat marionette theater in a Dublin suburb for three years with regular Saturday afternoon performances of fairy tales, and more ambitious pieces including Stravinsky’s Pulcinella and also worked for a year with a touring puppet opera company.

After receiving a degree in English and French at Trinity College Dublin he wrote his doctoral thesis on the French director Gaston Baty (whose interest in puppets had attracted him). After teaching English language and Literature for three years at Åbo Akademi in Finland he took up a post as lecturer in French at the University of Glasgow. He returned to Dublin in 1970 with his wife Clodagh and family of 4 daughters (one of whom is now a puppeteer) to take up a post in the French Department of Trinity College. Very active as a director of student productions with both live actors and puppets, he also campaigned for the establishment of a Drama Department at Trinity. This was finally established in 1984 and he became its first director. In 1998 he took early retirement so as to be able to devote himself entirely to research in puppet theatre and to work with puppets.

A founder of the Irish Theatre Archive in 1981.
President of UNIMA Ireland
Director of the International Puppet Festival, Dublin.

Main publications:
Le Théâtre Britannique Contemporain, Brussels, Renaissance du Livre, 1972.
Eugène Ionesco – Tueur sans gages, critical edition with introduction and notes, London, London University Press, 1972
(With David Bradby) People’s Theatre, London, Croom Helm, 1972
“Joseph Bouchardy: a melodramatist and his public” in  David Bradby, Louis James and Bernard Sharratt (eds.) Performance and Politics in Popular Drama, Cambridge University Press, 1980.
Melodrama Theatres of the French Boulevard, Cambridge, Chadwyck-Healey, 1982
Dion Boucicault 1820-1890, Cambridge, Chadwyck-Healey, 1987
Entries on 19th century French Theatre in The Cambridge Guide to Theatre, ed. Martin Banham, Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Popular Theatres of Nineteenth-Century France, London, Routledge, 1993.
(With Claude Schumacher) editor of “France, 1851-1919” in Naturalism and Symbolism in European Theatre 1850-1914, Cambride University Press, 1996.
(With Bennie Pratasik) Popular Puppet Theatre in Europe 1800-1914, Cambridge University Press, 1998.
“A travelling Marionette Theatre in 19th Century France: Le Grand Théâtre Pitou”, in The Puppetry Yearbook, vol 5., ed. James Fisher, , Lampeter, Edwin Mellen, 2002.
Entries on Puppets and Masks in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance, ed. Dennis Kennedy, Oxford University Press, 2003.
(With Clodagh McCormick and John Phillips) The Victorian Marionette Theatre, Iowa University Press, 2004.
“Scaramouche, Actor, Dancer, Marionette and Glove-puppet” in The Puppetry Yearbook, vol. 6, ed. James Fisher, Lampeter, Edwin Mllen Press, 2005.
Various articles on the Bonecos de Santo Aleixo mostly published in Adagio.
Currently writing a book on 500 years of Puppet Theatre in Italy.