I tried being a puppeteer for a new Scottish Nessie production - it was much harder than it looks

“Don’t put him down like that, we don’t want a dead puppet,” Keith Macpherson tells me.

I’m at Pitlochry Festival Theatre, where the cast of Nessie, a new puppet-led musical, is in rehearsal.

Nessie will be performed at Edinburgh's Studio Theatre. | Jane Bradley

It is the first production to have come from the Musical Commissioning Hub – a project between Pitlochry and Edinburgh’s Capital Theatres to develop the next big Scottish musical.

The show by composer and musical director, Shonagh Murray, has been developed from scratch into a fully developed performance. It is due to premiere on Friday at the Festival Theatre’s Studio venue in Edinburgh, before moving on to Pitlochry in July.

Mr Macpherson is the voice - and movement - behind Oggie the otter, a friend of Nessa, the Loch Ness monster.

A dead puppet is one that is not moving, Mr Macpherson explains. If a puppet character is not active on stage, it still needs to look alive. If the puppeteer zones out and the puppet stays still, or worse, lies the puppet on its side as I’ve just done, it looks like it has become a corpse.

Eden Barrie plays Nessa. | Edinburgh Festival Theatre

Mr Macpherson manages to make Oggie look like he is very much alive. Tiny movements of his body, just a push of one finger, allow Oggie to appear as if he is breathing: still full of life even when he is not actively moving on stage.

Under Mr Macpherson’s control, Oggie can be made to run and can use his tail to sit up. His head is easily manipulated to respond to another character. “You have to divide it up so that everything is very clear, choreographed and planned out,” he says. “It looks flowing, but every movement is planned.”

Mr Macpherson adds: “It’s a bit tricky. I was lucky because I’ve done one production with a puppet before. It takes a while to get back into the way of it. You have to remember to just do one thing at a time.”

It is a different skill entirely for Eden Barrie and Louis Newman who operate Nessa herself - the Loch Ness monster who meets a young girl called Mara. Although surprisingly light, the specially-made puppet requires two people to operate.

While Mr Newman, who is, in his own words, “the back end of Nessa”, does not have to voice the character, Ms Barrie - like Mr Macpherson and Alyson Orr, who plays Heather the heron - not only has to manipulate the head and flippers of the monster, but also be her voice for both speaking and singing.

Meanwhile, when Mr Newman is playing his other part of Ally, Mara’s friend, Ms Barrie has to move Nessa alone, restricting her movement options.

Moving Nessa is harder than it looks. Arts correspondent Jane Bradley gives it a go. | Jane Bradley

Ms Barrie explains that Nessa’s movements have to be carefully choreographed. She and Mr Newman spend hours “playing around” in the rehearsal studios, trying to learn how best to move around the stage.

“There’s a part when Nessa can curl her tail around her whole body,” says Ms Barrie. “We save that movement for an emotional moment in the play.”

Jane Bradley with Keith Macpherson, who plays Oggie. | Jane Bradley

What is most surprising is the actors are not professional puppeteers. Two, by chance, have worked on a production that involved puppets once before, but for Ms Barrie and Mr Newman, it is the first time.

All four have had to learn the skills required to move the puppets in a natural way, with help from a puppeteering expert who has held workshops with them ahead of the main rehearsals.

Ms Orr tries to teach me to make her puppet walk. Inside the body of the heron are two wooden levers, which can be flicked up and down, moving Heather’s flappy feet. While Ms Orr’s manipulations allow a graceful movement, mine are far more clunky.

“Like a real heron, she is quite stationary a lot of the time, they don’t do a lot of big moves,” she says. “It is more gliding moves.”

I think I’ll stick to writing.

Nessie will premiere on Friday, March 28 at the Studio Theatre in Edinburgh and will run to April 5, before heading to Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s Studio from July 9 to August 16.