Bread and Puppet is one of the longest-running non-profit making, self-supporting theatre companies in the USA, remarkable for its large-scale work produced with volunteers. It grew from the weekly puppet shows given in the early 1960s in a loft in New York’s Lower East Side, by the recent emigrants from Germany Peter Schumann and his wife Elka. Born in Silesia in 1934, Shumann became a refugee in Schleswig-Holstein with his family, where their life involved making sourdough rye bread baked in a communal bakery. As a child Schumann and his brothers and sisters also created puppet shows for any occasion.

Originally called the Moosach Puppet Theatre and People Puppet Theatre, the Schumanns took their show on the road in a trailer converted as a mobile puppet theatre, staging impromptu performances in New England. Back in New York City in 1963 the Schumanns converted the Delancey Street loft into a theatre and puppet museum where Bread and Puppet Theatre gained its name, referencing Schumann’s custom of sharing with his audience members sourdough bread baked by him. The company’s early work in New York City ranged from children’s puppet shows to the large-scale outdoor pageants and street shows of 1964, 1965 and 1966 in the poorest areas of the city addressing urban, political and social issues, and protesting about the war in Vietnam, using massive moving sculptures or twenty-foot tall puppets. Their 1968 anti-Vietnam war show Fire led to performances abroad, at a festival in France in 1968, and in June 1969 at London’s Royal Court Theatre where they performed The Cry of the People for Meat from 24th to 128th June, and Theatre of Warand Blue Raven Beauty from 30th June to th July. From 7th to 12t July their programme consisted of The Cry of the People for Meat, or a double bill.

The Cry of the People for Meat was a parable-like mystery play that opened with the joining of two twenty-foot high puppets, Mother Earth and a vulgar Uncle Sam, representing the forces of greed and imperialism. From their union came their son Cronus, who presides over the fall of Adam and Eve, the killing of Abel, and other biblical stories. The Times, 25 June 1969 published Irving Wardle's review of The Cry of the People for Meat in which he noted: 'The puppets are the glory of this company. Even when they are motionless, these grotesque figures, some 20 feet high, are insistent presences, malevolently or seraphically questioning the value of the scurrying human life around them.'

The Schumanns moved to Plainfield, Vermont in 1970 where Goddard College offered them a theatre residency. They started performing in a field at Cate Farm on the Goddard campus where their first summer show Our Domestic Resurrection Circus - ‘like a history of America, ending in Vietnam’ - embraced carnival and circus and featured the enormous puppets that characterised their work.

In 1975 they moved to Glover, Vermont, where the landscape provided them with a natural amphitheatre in an old gravel pit allowing them to perform large-scale outdoor productions without amplification. Their vast and moving spectacles resulted in huge crowds gathering annually, but after 1998 the Circus was succeeded by a summer programme and touring productions addressing issues of the day, still featuring their astonishing and moving sculptural creations.

This poster features a screen-pint image of one of the vast puppets featured in The Cry of the People for Meat,and after the company opened at London's Royal Court Theatre on 24th June 1969 the critic Harold Hobson wrote in The Sunday Times, 26th June, that: 'Peter Schumann's production has the vitality, the noise, and the primeval appeal of the fairground: his players merge and grow into the enormous puppets they bring on to the stage, describing the evening as: 'an experience as impressive as it is unique.'