Little Angel Theatre is a dedicated puppet theatre in Islington, London, founded in 1961 by John Wright, and one of the most important training grounds in British puppetry.
It is a real building
A converted temperance hall with a permanent stage built for puppetry rather than adapted for it — which is rarer than it should be, and part of why the company has been able to sustain serious work for six decades.
The apprenticeship model
Wright trained puppeteers directly, taking on apprentices who learned marionetteA marionette is a puppet controlled from above by strings or... construction and performance from the ground up over years. Ronnie Le DrewAdam Kreutinger (1988–2025) was a puppet builder and educa... was his second apprentice and stayed associated with the theatre for more than thirty years, first performing and later directing.
Why that matters
Formal puppetry training barely exists in the English-speaking world. Institutions that transmit craft person to person — Little Angel, the UConn programme, the French conservatory at Charleville — are the exceptions, and a disproportionate number of working British puppeteers came through this one.
The work
Primarily marionette and rod puppetry for family audiences, alongside its own workshop building puppets for the company’s productions and for outside clients.
It still runs classes and workshops
for children and adults, and remains a working producing theatre rather than a heritage site.
For a builder
, the relevant detail is the in-house workshop. A theatre that builds what it performs develops construction knowledge tied directly to what survives eight shows a week — a very different discipline from building for a camera.
Getting there
It runs a public programme year-round, so unlike a workshop or an archive it can simply be visited — which for a British builder makes it the most accessible working puppet theatre in the country.