IT’S unlikely the legendary author Roald Dahl ever dreamed his tale of urban witches preying on children would transfer to the stage.

If he had, he might have chosen a different animal than a mouse to be the centre of attention for the second half of the play – and might have left puppet director Rachel Leonard with slightly less of a headache.

“[Director] Dale Rooks didn’t want to go for children in costumes,” says the puppeteer, who was part of the puppetry team which brought Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse to life at the National Theatre.

“We have gone for something more like a rat rather than a life-size mouse. I believe audiences can see small details if the operator’s focus is strong enough to make you want to see it.

“When you go to a football stadium no one has problems seeing the ball, because everyone is focused on that pin-prick sized object. It’s the same thing if one focuses on a theatre piece.”

Leonard’s role in this year’s Chichester Festival Youth Theatre production is threefold.

Not only is she directing the puppetry in collaboration with Rooks, but she’s also teaching the team of young actors how to operate the models, and designing and making the rod puppets from scratch.

“I do much less of that normally,” she admits. “Taking on a commission to design and make puppets for a whole production is a big challenge.”

She believes the puppet operators are also facing a big challenge in learning the basics of the art and stagecraft of puppetry.

“It’s a big ask for young performers to take on,” she says. “You have to channel that energy through the controller you’re holding, you want the audience to believe what you’re doing.

“It’s an amazing learning curve for them, which will stand them in good stead as theatre practitioners in the future.”

Puppetry has been gradually moving out of the ghetto of children’s theatre with the help of critically-acclaimed productions such as Shockheaded Peter, Avenue Q and War Horse.

Even the Royal Shakespeare Company has teamed up with Islington-based puppet specialists Little Angel Theatre for a very different version of The Tempest.

“Puppets ask the audience to buy into a belief system and play the game,” says Leonard, who learnt her craft at the Little Angel.

“It’s much more rewarding for an audience as they have to invest much more, so they get much more out of it. War Horse was a good example of an audience being happy to do a lot of work – they could see the outlines of the horses and the operators, and had to work out how the things were being done. They started looking for signals like signs of nervous energy.

“They were experiencing the puppet as a living creature; there’s a huge pleasure in telling a story like that.”

Leonard’s own interest in puppetry came from travelling the world after studying at drama college.

“I got interested in the idea of world storytellers, who use theatrical and ethnic art to tell their stories,” she says.

“I turned up at Little Angel Theatre and asked if they did courses so I could find out more. They said they would love an extra pair of hands but didn’t have any extra budget to pay me, so were willing to give me some courses in exchange.”

She has worked with a variety of puppets, from marionettes to shadow puppetry, but admits her favourite projects are working in a team on a character.

“There’s a Japanese style of puppet theatre called bunraku where you have three operators on one figure,” she says. “It’s very much how the War Horse puppets worked. It feels magical when you get a team bonded around one figure.”

The Witches won’t be Leonard’s last Christmas show – she has already worked on the puppet direction for Little Angel’s The Night Before Christmas, directed by Ben Glasstone.

And she’s going back to the Dagmar Passage theatre for the January show Sleeping Beauty In The Wood, which Leonard helped devise more than ten years ago.

For now she’s finishing off her creations for Chichester.

“They are using quite sturdy prototypes for the main two characters in rehearsals,” she says.

“There’s a snake and some real mice that I haven’t made for the production. Those are natural creatures not made by the witches.

“The creatures made by the witches are being made in a slightly different style – not naturalistic! There’s a touch of magic in them. I’m trying to bring in elements that are part of the witches’ world.”