Toby Olié made his professional breakthrough when he was recruited to the role of Joey the Horse in the groundbreaking National Theatre production of War Horse (2007). His skills as a Puppetry director, designer, and puppeteer have transformed many productions including the Royal Ballet’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Disney Theatrical’s The Little Mermaid, a national tour of Animal Farm, and the London Coliseum production of Spirited Away, which was Olivier-nominated for Best Set Design earlier this year. He is also co-founder of the theatre company Gyre & Gimble. When the Royal Shakespeare Company decided to put on The BFG for their winter family show, Olié was the obvious choice to bring the book’s more phantasmagorical characters to life…
On the stage adaptation:
Tom Wells [who adapted the book for the stage] has found a beautiful balance between sentiment and silliness. It’s a series of really beautiful encounters, either between Sophie and BFG, or Sophie BFG and the Queen. There is this very personal, very intimate story that just happens to be going on between an orphan, a giant and the queen of England.
How does an audience follow the characters through when each is so different? That played into one of our central ideas of how we would stage it, which was about how power can shift, and how it doesn't necessarily correlate to size. At the start, Sophie is an orphan who thinks she's very powerless and doesn't access her imagination. Then she's kidnapped by a giant who she assumes is a big, scary, powerful thing but when she arrives in his cave she soon discovers there are other giants that are even bigger and more terrifying, so all of a sudden he's not the most powerful one. And then they have a plan, to go and talk to the Queen of England to save the day. But actually, the queen is so protected by the system around her that she's actually quite powerless. And we use all of that in the show: we change scale depending on where the power dynamic is, using illusions, video design, set design – and puppets – which means you're allowed to access this story from a lot of different perspectives.
It’s a story about standing up to bullies and understanding each other and using compassion to solve problems, so it feels really brilliant that the audience isn't just seeing one side – they're constantly changing perspective and opinion throughout.
On creating the BFG:
Everybody has met or knows these characters; through books, films, illustrations – even the Sainsbury’s advert – and everybody has expectations. It’s been great to home in and make them feel as relevant and endearing and lively as possible.
I was really aware that if you had a life size BFG and he was fully formed we would have more puppeteers,
and he wouldn't be able to move at a naturalistic speed. He would take a little bit longer to do everything, and so with the bigger puppets we try to essentialise them so the bits that you do see behave as naturalistically as possible. We’re imagining the bits of the puppet that aren't there; our imaginations are filling in those gaps. We’re all complicit in this together, which is really exciting.
On the role of puppets in the play:
You can't really tell a story like the BFG without the ‘invisible’ people that are the puppeteers. The audience sees them, but they know they're not supposed to – they're not people, they are theatre.
We’ve got puppets, we’ve got set and costume illusions, video design, lots of amazing use of technology, and from day one it's just been such a level playing field to work on together knowing no one department can tell this story by themselves. You see the creative baton being passed and we’re harnessing and accessing the audience's imagination in a way that that Sophie’s imagination is woken up and accessed in the story.
We've got some puppets in the show that are [operated by] one person, others two and the main BFG puppet is four. So you end up in a non-verbal and constant state of communication through breath, impulse, action or momentum. My job is to empower a team of people who then start to exist and live as one, and make brilliant choices without me having to suggest every single moment of every scene.
The audience should be watching a puppet character and know exactly what it is thinking and feeling at any point. Your focus can go between the actors around it and back to it, but a puppet should remain a constant presence, a living being on the stage.
On War Horse:
I always joked that being in War Horse was like being in puppet Hamlet. You don't leave the stage for two and a bit hours, and that puppet is an emotional catalyst throughout the whole story.
You can have a beautiful script that's fully realised and emotionally truthful, but actually the staging and how that script is performed needs to be nurtured and developed alongside that – that both things, script and staging, have to be very robust and respond to each other. I think there’s been a really exciting post-War Horse renaissance in mainstream theatre with puppets playing featured roles to be developed in parallel with the script (sometimes before). Puppetry encourages a collaborative atmosphere.
On anthropomorphism (attributing human traits to inanimate objects):
We look at the clouds and we see pictures – a face or a horse or whatever. There's a wheelie bin outside my building that's got some nuts and bolts on it, and a bit of moulded plastic which looks like a face. We did a development workshop for the show with neutral, blank mannequin puppets and you really have to impart a lot of your imagination onto them [but they become] very emotive.
You wouldn't want to come and see the BFG and find a load of neutral mannequin puppets, though. With CGI and special effects in cinema, you don't need to use any imagination and reading a book you need to use 100% of your imagination. Theatre is in the middle, and puppetry is in the middle of that.
On Christmas Day:
I’ll be with my family. They live on the coast, and usually, Christmas day is spent by me and my husband wrangling the dog into a tiny Santa hat, which he does love. He goes around and shows it off and then when you try and take a picture of him, he looks miserable as sin. It's really very silly.
My two annual traditions that some family members take part in (some don't!) is that Christmas Eve is for watching The Muppets Christmas Carol and Christmas Day is for The Nightmare Before Christmas.
The BFG is on at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford Upon Avon until 7 February 2026. For more information and to book tickets, visit rsc.org.uk.
Image of cast in rehearsal (c) Marc Brenner
