Happy hearts ache in Burkett's latest marvel
BY LIZ NICHOLLS

Happy * * * * * (five stars)

Ronnie Burkett's diminutive actors are as large as life. And they've always known how to tell a story that moves forward onstage, because you care about them. 

Sometimes they're players in a surging, resonant fable like Tinka's New Dress, a powerful tale of coercion, resistance and accommodation set in the shadow of the Holocaust. Sometimes they find themselves propelling an epic, like Street Of Blood's bizarre gothic intersection of prairie folk, vampires and the second coming of Christ. 

With his latest, Happy, the third of his remarkable Memory Dress Trilogy, Burkett and his company of marionette actors tackle something less technically spectacular but perhaps even more difficult. And they achieve something that's maybe even more moving. 

Each character we meet in the rooming house onstage has his own story -- sometimes a single missed opportunity, a regret, a loss, a hope, a consuming private sorrow, an instant of pure possibility. For some, the moment stops time, locks the character in the grey chamber of memory, and throws away the key. For the title character Happy, an aged war vet of mysterious, apparently limitless resilience, not so. And there's every shading in between. 

The marionettes are exquisite, as you might expect from Burkett. They pulse with life; you know their hands are warm. But there's a new air of simplicity, even austerity, about Happy. 

And maybe it's because the connection between the characters, living their solitary lives in a rooming house while camped out on the edge of vast subterranean caverns of grief, isn't exotic narrative or flashy wit. 

It's the homelier, smaller, more banal currency of ordinary life that changes hands a sheckel at a time. 

"Right, I'm off to the store then," says the ancient caretaker Raymond for the umpteenth time to everyone. Lucille, a salty-tongued party girl grown old and creaky, is forever bumming a smoke and complaining that men are jerks and her (non-sensible) shoes are killing her feet. There's a plump, perpetually smiling geezer named Skinny, and a couple of wonderfully recognizable, decaying old coots observing in silence. 

The most flamboyant character, a gay Puerto Rican hairdresser who squabbles hilariously with his morose boyfriend, turns out to be part-Chinese and from Moose Jaw, for heaven's sake. Even the homespun pensioner philospher Happy doesn't deal in large metaphysical abstractions about life and aging, but muses on the minutiae, the fascinating little decrepitudes of the flesh. He'll remind you of Street's plump prairie matron Mrs. Edna Rural, whose wisdom begins in jellied salad and proper gravy. 

And the character at the centre is an apparently ordinary young girl with an unexceptional boyfriend who calls her "ya goof." With Drew's sudden death, just as they're about to make love, Carla plummets into freefall grief that seems to have no bottom. And her morbid, generic little poem -- "I always thought if I fell it would be because I was pushed. Or I jumped." -- is suddenly invested with meaning, transformed into a sort of manifesto in an inexplicable universe. 

The image of memory as a rented room in a boarding house is haunting in itself. And it's strikingly realized on Burkett's stage, dominated by an outsized, beautifully constructed cabinet that rotates, opening drawers or cupboards to reveal locations. There's even a plate display shelf, each new dish a souvenir of the latest loss. We see death in more graphic terms as a puppet is slid into a body bag and tucked gently into a drawer. 

And there's a tiny vaudeville stage between front and back. That's where MC Antoine Marionette, sporting an update of the French Revolution look with platinum punk hair, sequined bloomers and an edge from a guillotine, presides over "the Grey Cabaret." 

From time to time he introduces acts of a suitably morbid cast: the torchy Miss Cleo Paine (Queen of Denial), or tragical cellist Jacqueline duPressed, or lounge lizard Mr. Johnny Throb. 

Carla, numbed, is an audience of one who doesn't even face the stage. 

Burkett's marionettes have always had a complex, shifting relationship -- sometimes subversive, sometimes confrontational -- with their string-puller, especially since they insist on a life of their own. 

Puppets are bound to be troubled existentialists, when you think about it. In Tinka, for example, the puppet characters are themselves puppeteers, manipulating puppets.  In Street, Burkett plays Jesus, true, but a Christ figure who refuses to intervene. Here, the marionettes actually seem to have triumphed over the marionettiste. 

They assign Burkett to play Drew, for example, from beyond the grave, still talking in reductive terms. 

"You gotta lighten up, baby," he tells his grief-stricken lover, slumped on the stage below him. Later, "she loved me big-time." 

Burkett's virtuosity has always been, well, breathtaking: the inclination of a marionette head, the stoop of a shoulder, the turn-out of an ankle. 

It's a measure here of his subtlety as a playright and actor in shaping a show with real emotional force that he can simply stand between two motionless marionettes, empty-handed, as they continue their painful discussion. 

Mere heads have full-bodied life; the puppeteer's own hand can be a character.  Bill Williams' lighting, on a monochromatic set, counts as a true player. The stage pictures are spare -- a tiny chandelier stands in, effortlessly, for a war-time era. One memorably moving scene is shared by a Canadian soldier and a death camp survivor. It is a wonderful achievement. 

Happy doesn't explain itself. And it can be perplexing; there are things about it I couldn't explain to you if I tried. But his little people think, and feel, big. Led by Happy and his arsenal of simple homilies that are a fortification against mortality and loss but only if they're lived, in colour, it gives us a big, rich experience of the twin mysteries of human buoyancy and despair.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
More full reviews