German puppeteer and director of a puppet company. The lawyer Werner Perrey led the puppet company Das Niederdeutsche Puppenspiel (The Low German Puppet Show/Theatre) in Kiel from 1922. This glove puppet company introduced contemporary themes in its evening programmes for adults, using the puppet as a mediator between illusion and reality.

Werner Perrey took the fictional and superficial character of his plays as a theme challenging the audience to discover the true meaning of events. This critical process was aimed at the absurdity of modern everyday life. His themes revolved around the norms of bourgeois behaviour, showing that these “norms of behaviour” were only apparently possible to maintain. Two examples of these types of plays are Phantasie in Kitsch Moll (Fantasy in Kitsch Minor) and Die Unvermeidlichen (The Inevitables). Werner Perrey was one of the pioneers of this approach at the time.

(See Germany.)