“This autumn, for the first time in its history, the Royal Shakespeare Company is to collaborate with one of the country’s leading puppet theatres to present a marionette masque version of Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare’s great, sensual poem… Over the past three months the puppets have been crafted in secret by experts from the Czech Republic, Germany and South Africa inside the Islington workshops of the puppet theatre. The miniature costumes are still being sewn together in the wardrobe department at Stratford-upon-Avon.”