Water puppets, and why an hour of it is exactly right

Water puppets are the one piece of Vietnamese theatre almost every visitor sees. Usually on a wet afternoon in Hanoi, and usually without knowing what they are looking at. The short version: the puppets stand in a pool, the rods run under the surface, and the puppeteers are behind the screen, waist-deep in the same water.

Water puppets are a village art that became a tourist show, and the art survived by becoming one. It is about 1,000 years old and the show you will see runs for an hour.

What happens in the hour?

A run of 15 or so short scenes rather than a plot. Farmers plant and harvest, fishermen argue over a catch, a fox steals ducks from a tree, 4 dragons chase each other around the pool spitting sparklers, and a boy rides a buffalo. Each scene lasts a couple of minutes.

The orchestra sits at the side and plays live: a dan bau, drums, and singers who narrate in the cheo style. Nothing is subtitled, and nothing needs to be.

Where should you see them?

Thang Long Water Puppet Theatre in Hanoi, a minute from the north end of Hoan Kiem lake, if you want the reliable version. It runs several shows a day and the puppeteers are the best in the country. The room seats a few hundred, so the back row is fine.

The things to do in Hanoi page places it against the rest of a wet afternoon, which is when most people end up going.

What does it cost, and should you book?

Between about 100,000 and 200,000 dong a seat in Hanoi, with the front rows dearest. Book a day or 2 ahead in the busy months. The theatres are small and the evening slots go first, so turning up at seven expecting a ticket for half past is how people end up at the 21:00 show.

Front rows get lightly splashed by the dragons. That is a feature if you are seven and a consideration if you have a camera on your lap.

Is it authentic, or is it a tourist show?

The show is both, and the honest answer is that the tourist version kept the village one alive. A water puppet show began as village entertainment in the flooded fields of the Red River Delta about 1,000 years ago, performed after the harvest, and the form was close to dying out by the 1950s.

What saved it is the thing people are suspicious of: a permanent theatre, daily shows and a paying audience of visitors. The puppeteers train for years, stand in the water for every performance, and work rods nobody sees. Calling that inauthentic because the audience holds tickets misreads what happened.

Can you see the village version?

Sometimes, and it takes planning. A handful of Red River Delta villages keep their own troupes and perform at festivals or on request, most often around the lunar new year and through the spring festival season.

The Museum of Ethnology in Hanoi is the practical middle ground. It hosts visiting village groups at weekends in a pond rather than a theatre pool, alongside the best museum collection in the country. The museums guide covers what else is in there.

Is it worth an hour with children?

A water puppet show is the best hour in Hanoi for a child, and one of the few indoor options that needs no reading. The scenes are short, loud and visual, the dragons arrive before attention runs out, and nobody minds noise.

The Vietnam with children guide covers the rest of the wet-afternoon problem, which in Hanoi is a real planning constraint rather than a footnote.

What should you know before you go?

Arrive 10 minutes early, because seating is by ticket and the room fills. Read the scene list in the programme if you want the stories, since the narration will not help.

And keep the expectation the right size. A water puppet show is an hour of short comic scenes performed on water rather than a grand piece of theatre — the three stage forms behind it are where that lives, and it is one of the few things in Hanoi that lasts exactly as long as it should.

The festivals guide has the weeks when village troupes perform for their own audiences instead.