Young Peoples Puppet Theatre
Father-and-daughter team Jeremy and Caitlin Duschenes are the co-founders of the Young People’s Puppet Theatre (YPPT), an educational charity bringing large-scale marionette productions into schools across South East England. Rooted in a rich family legacy of puppetry, the YPPT’s work blends tradition, education, and collaboration—empowering thousands of young people to create and perform their own shows. The Duschenes’ journey into puppetry isn’t just personal—it’s generational. Beginning in 1920s Hamburg, Jeremy’s great-grandparents built a marionette theatre in their living room, performing for their local community. Despite being forced to leave Germany in the 1930s, the family’s connection to puppetry endured. Jeremy’s father Mario continued the tradition in Switzerland, staging Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale with marionettes in 1947 before moving to Canada and performing it again in the 1960s and 1970s.
That same production has echoed through the generations—revived multiple times by Caitlin’s father, Jeremy, and now forming a cornerstone of YPPT’s work today. YPPT projects have 3 phases: puppet making, set design and rehearsals/performance. In the first, each child designs and makes their own marionette, sculpting heads, hands and feet and sewing a costume before assembling a pre-cut wooden body. They then move on to create backdrops and props in groups for the YPPT’s traditional “box-style” staging, which allows large-scale participation. For rehearsals, each class becomes a full production team: puppeteers, voice actors, stage crew, lighting & sound and a student Stage Manager. The productions are impressively technical, with a custom-built sliding stage system allowing complex scene changes in seconds.
With professional-grade touring stages (designed by Brilliant Stages / Production Park), school halls are transformed into fully realised theatres—raising both the stakes and the students’ ambitions. As of 2026, the YPPT has run over 150 productions with over 5,000 children. The projects’ impact is huge – the children grow palpably in confidence, resilience, teamworking skills and much more, as well as gaining an understanding of what it takes to create a complex marionette show from start to finish. For Jeremy and Caitlin, the real magic happens backstage, as the children realise they can exceed even their own expectations of what they can achieve, and go out for their bows at the end of the show beaming with pride. Website Instagram Facebook