“I was working as the world’s worst director,” he confesses, “and I wasn’t making any money. Wilde’s involvement was based – rather appropriately, for this book – on a lie. They met when Nicholson was workshopping a different performance of I Want My Hat Back. “His parents made him a bear, and they took the bear out around their town looking for the hat.”įor more than a decade, this bulbous bear has been central to the pair’s work and friendship. “I remember getting an email about this little boy who hadn’t wanted to go out after lockdown,” says Wilde. Some even recreated the full productions and uploaded them, giving the animals the same accents that Nicholson did. It’s all about hiding the action.” Nicholson’s raised eyebrows and sideways smirks do just as much for the story as the tortoise, snake or frog – all of whom swear they haven’t seen the bear’s hat.ĭuring the pandemic, children from around the world made their own versions of the puppets. “I often think of it as the Psycho of children’s books,” says Wilde seriously. The total online audience for the trilogy would be equivalent to selling out the Little Angel for a year and a half.įor their hilarious mischief, lack of morals and embrace of casual brutality, Klassen’s books are popular with parents as well as kids. The morning it went online, 1,000 viewers watched live. “I was convinced the only people to watch it would be my kids,” Wilde says.

They never expected the shows to go viral. The first one, eight minutes long, took six hours to film. “I don’t know how to edit,” Nicholson admits. Photograph: Ian NicholsonĮach of the online shows was filmed in one dramatic take – a decision born out of necessity. Sam Wilde making puppets for I Want My Hat Back. A bike shop that had opened down the road was throwing out cardboard boxes the bear’s eyes were beads swiped from one of his daughter’s necklaces. The set of the first one just about fits into a shoebox, and was made from what Wilde had to hand. “I can’t stress how tiny everything was,” says Nicholson, who performed and directed the shows kneeling behind his kitchen table. The trilogy went viral and is now transferring – with bigger puppets, new actors and a good deal more cardboard – to the Little Angel theatre in London. “Even if that just lasted 15 minutes, that’s something I will always be proud of.” In the lockdown of spring 2020, Wilde and director Ian Nicholson created homemade online productions of Jon Klassen’s trilogy of subversive children’s picture books, starting with I Want My Hat Back, in which a ponderous bear searches for his missing pointy red hat. ‘W e made nearly half a million kids happy with a cardboard box,” says set designer Sam Wilde.

I want my hat back online