Alcove of innocence and fancy

Giggles and whispers ripple like a breeze through the darkened auditorium.

The curtain slides open and the inevitable scolding voice cries out — the babushka, self-appointed custodian of child-rearing and decorum. “Quiet, now, people paid good money...''

Gulliver's ship tumbles dizzily onstage, suspended on sticks, tossed on glistening waves of chiffon. Soon he is shipwrecked, a hulking figure taken prisoner by the tiny Lilliputians.

Now Gulliver is a papier mache head the size of a taxi, small puppets squeaking around him.

The show melts into a two-hour optical illusion, juxtaposing hulking puppets, human beings and hand-sized figurines on the same stage to convey an impossible jumble of scale.

The crowd is electrified. It is another night at the Obraztsov State Puppet Theatre, a throwback to Soviet state culture, the popularity of which remains undiminished as Moscow grows faster and slicker around it.

Outside the theatre doors, contemporary Russia rushes on. A hard winter is closing down on the streets.

Along the six lanes of the improbably named Garden Ring, traffic lumbers heavily, hopelessly, round the clock, halted only when one of Russia's most important men shushes through in an ultra-fast, black-tinted blur.

Inside, a warm, buttery light falls on a packed house. You can pay less than $10 for a cheap seat and escape to a warm den of high voices, colours and restless imagination.

“The possibilities for puppet theatre surpass ordinary theatre. You can create anything,'' says Andrei Luchin, the head of the theatre. “In puppets, everything is possible.''

The puppet theatre seems lost in another time, sheltered from the grim march of Russian history.

When the faces tilt upward and the puppets jerk and dance onstage, the air is laced with old fairytales and firesides and flights of winter fancy.

“I still play little girls and nobody sees that I am old and already have grandchildren,'' says Alexandra Gorbunova, 58, rustling backstage in pink petticoats. “This is the amazing thing.''

The puppeteers work six days a week, Gorbunova says, and take home paltry pay — the average salary is less than $430, slim sustenance in the world's most expensive city.

Still, they throw themselves into the shows and consider themselves actors.

Nostalgia sometimes seems stronger than any Russian ideology. And nostalgia, in turn, is wrapped up in children.

The Moscow icons that survived most handily from Soviet times are often monuments to childhood. When Detsky Mir, the iconic toyshop with the carousel in the middle, closed for renovation this year, preservationists and grandmothers howled in protest.

At the 77-year-old puppet theatre, many older spectators seem to be looking for a piece of something they remember. Yelena Kotova frets that her 5-year-old granddaughter is growing up in England and losing her Russian.

Every year, when the girl visits, she is brought straight away to the puppet theatre. “When her mother was her age, we always went,'' Kotova says, clucking over her granddaughter's blonde head. “We loved it very much.''

From outside, the theatre looks like nothing — a slab, a cube, plopped down indifferently on the rim of a dreary road.

But like the clock on its façade, whose hidden doors burst open on the hour to reveal twirling figurines from Russian folklore, the theatre's blank face belies its trove of colour.

Hundreds of puppets from all over the world haunt the theatre's museum, frilled and aged and gnarled, cased in glass.

There is a workshop where craftsmen make papier mache shoe buckles, stitch together tiny, perfectly tailored costumes and worry over how to hinge a wooden jaw so it has just the right dash of insouciance.

And in cramped rows of velvet seats, fussed-over Russian children sit transfixed, and corpulent babushkas peer through aged opera glasses. The hall is austere, walls empty and nondescript — all attention is drawn towards the stage.

The shows are geared for adults, too. The company stages Pushkin, Kipling and sharp works of religious satire.

Every New Year's Eve, Muscovites throng the auditorium to see the trademark production, the 60-year-old Unusual Concert.

The comedic variety show is built around the puppet master of ceremonies, whose jokes in recent years have been recast to include references to the internet and racketeering.

The theatre was the creation of Sergey Obraztsov, the puppet master who remains one of the world's most celebrated innovators of the craft — and who, 16 years after his death, remains a beloved household name in Russia.

The stories of Obraztsov are still legend in the theatre that bears his name. How he shared his Moscow flat with Siamese cats and crocodiles carted home from his travels.

How he was born in tsarist times, living through revolution and war and communism but still called the Soviet collapse the worst era of all because it shoved beggars and talented musicians into the streets of Moscow.

But most of all, they remember his obsession with making wood and cloth come alive, for the allegorical wonder of puppetry.

Today his granddaughter, 52-year-old Yekaterina Obraztsova, directs shows in the theatre.

It is her production of Gulliver's Travels; she slips into the auditorium as the show gets under way, draped in beads and silk scarves, nervously scanning the full house.

“Children now live a different life, they see a lot of attractions and a lot of animated cartoons. The tempo of their lives is different,'' Obraztsova says.

“But for some reason in the puppet theatre, they adjust to a different rhythm and they are happy to fill the space, to watch and understand.''