14 Facts About Peter Scriven

Peter Scriven MBE was an Australian puppeteer, writer and theatre producer, and the founding artistic director of the Marionette Theatre of Australia.

Peter Scriven was supported by a team of five young puppeteers supervised by Igor Hyczka, a stage manager, a sound technician and a tour manager, Tony Gould.

Peter Scriven was highly dedicated even as a boy to marionettes.

Peter Scriven was a remarkable entrepreneur and used his own funds to establish his marionette company.

Peter Scriven was awarded an MBE in the Queen's Birthday honours list in 1970 for services to Theatre.

In late 1974 Peter Scriven put together a new version of The Tintookies.

When he left to live in the Philippines, the show was continued by Graeme Mathieson, an accomplished puppeteer with whom Peter Scriven had worked at the MTA.

Many of Peter Scriven's marionettes were lost in a warehouse fire.

Peter Scriven spent his last years living in increasingly reduced circumstances in Manila, finally subsisting on just $5 a day.

Peter Scriven worked on a play and an autobiography, but neither has been published.

In 1998, diagnosed with a brain tumour, Peter Scriven returned to Australia.

Peter Scriven had been here just three weeks when, on 13 October 1998, he was found dead in a boarding house in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane.

Peter Scriven was survived by many of his Tintookie marionettes, which now live in the archives of the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney, and his brother, philosopher and polymath Michael Scriven.

Funding for puppetry in Australia no longer attracts the level it once did from state and federal sources when Peter Scriven headed the defunct Marionette Theatre of Australia.