July 30 2026

Can you help?

If you’ve followed the news this week, you may have heard that somewhere between performances in Falmouth, one of our troll’s carefully handcrafted masks and 2 sets of enormous troll hands have disappeared.

We’ve checked the costume boxes.

The van.

Backstage.

We’ve retraced our steps, peered into hedgerows and had more than one conversation beginning, “Has anyone seen our troll?”

It’s not a sentence we imagined saying quite so often this summer.

Touring theatre has a habit of producing wonderfully unexpected moments.

Every performance of Peer Gynt begins long before the audience arrives. Our cast and crew travel from venue to venue with everything needed to transform castles, gardens and village greens into an outdoor theatre for the evening. Costumes, props, lighting, sound equipment and scenery are carefully packed into the van, unloaded, assembled and, once the final applause has faded, packed away ready to do it all again somewhere completely different the following day. 

Usually everything makes the journey.

Occasionally… something decides to go on an adventure of its own.

In this case, it happened to be part of our troll costume.

The missing mask and hands weren’t shop bought pieces. They were specially created for the production by our costume team, shaped, sculpted and painted by hand over many hours to help bring one of Peer Gynt’s most memorable characters to life.

They’re wonderfully distinctive, which means we’re hopeful someone might spot them and they might may their way back to us.

Perhaps they found themselves caught by last weekend’s extraordinary winds.

Perhaps they’re sitting patiently at the edge of a field, waiting to be discovered.

Perhaps they’re puzzling a very confused walker somewhere along the South West Coast Path.

Whatever happened, we’re keeping our fingers crossed that they’ll find their way home.

The show, of course, goes on but if anyone happens to spot an unusually large pair of troll hands or an unmistakable troll mask while you’re out and about, we’d be delighted to hear from you.

Give us a call on 01209 216762, email us at [email protected] or just drop them off at our office, we’re in Penryn opposite Muddy Beach café.