BRISTOL EXPERIMENTAL PUPPET FESTIVAL presents

The Crocodile of Sadness

A story about the importance of collectively sharing difficulty. Through cooperation and mutual care, the work asks how we can work together to solve problems, to carry communal loads, and reconcile with grief and sadness.

As hybrid digital and experimental performative work, The Crocodile of Sadness is presented as a pseudo-educational resource from the fictional world of Durt. Unfolding through layered narration, projected digital artefacts and staged “interruptions,” the performance positions itself between lecture, corrupted archive, and speculative storytelling.

Guided by the ceremonial narrator The Maddock and contextualised by The Rollop, an academic interpreter of myth, at the story’s centre is Drock, a crocodile who carries the Skyn Forest’s sadness in fragile, egg-like vessels. As the Skyn Forest’s inhabitants grow dependent on this system for managing grief, the story reveals the catastrophic outcomes of placing responsibility on a single figure.

Periodically, the narrative is disrupted by covert transmissions from Skrud, a hostile presence that reframes the tale as propaganda within a larger system of control orchestrated by the Great Communicator. These interferences destabilise the official account of the folkloric tale of The Crocodile of Sadness, exposing the tensions that arise between collective care and enforced progress.
Part unreliable archive, part experimental theatre, The Crocodile of Sadness invites audiences to navigate contradiction, asking how stories are standardised, who benefits from communication systems, and what happens when balance is lost. "

Doors at 8pm, and before the main performance at 10pm there will be various experimental puppet happenings playing hard, weird & soft with AV possibilities from mr_hopkinson and others