Pure happiness

Ronnie Burkett pulls all the right strings
By JOHN COULBOURN

TORONTO -- In the world of master marionetter Ronnie Burkett, it's not only life that's a cabaret. 

Happy, the latest work from the Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes, opened Thursday night at Canadian Stage's Berkeley Street Theatre, in a version somewhat revised from its World Stage premiere last year. In it, both the yin of life and the dark yang of death offer up fodder for a cabaret piece in which Burkett pulls all the strings. 

Which is pretty much what we've come to expect. Labouring exclusively in a genre long considered only fit for childish audiences, Burkett has expanded our vision while he has explored a whole range of adult themes in works such as Tinka's New Dress and Street Of Blood -- works that have done much to endear Burkett to an international audience of the theatrical cognizenti. 

 All of whom, it must be pointed out, are likely to embrace this new work with equal enthusiasm, as Burkett takes Happy's big-hearted, wooden-headed cast even deeper into the human psyche, exploring new depths of emotion while constantly challenging the reach of his medium. 

 Produced by Burkett's Rink-A-Dink Inc., Happy is set in two worlds: The here and now of a down-at-the-heels boarding house, and a sort of after-life cabaret, ruled by an androgynous harridan named Antoine Marionette. 

 Burkett's understated kitchen-cupboard set expands and contracts to accommodate both worlds like some sort of beneficent, but no less mesmerizing, version of the fabled Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. 

 The two worlds collide early in the show when death unexpectedly claims Drew, one of the boarding house's younger residents, leaving his young wife, Carla, devastated by grief and determined to hold on to Drew's fast-fading memory. 

 Through conversations with her housemates -- Ray, the timid caretaker; Lucille, the chain-smoking harridan; and Ricky and Kenny, the bickering gays -- and through subconscious visits to Antoine's other-worldly cabaret, Carla finds her own kind of peace within her sorrow and moves on. 

Through it all, Burkett has woven another character, that of Happy -- an aged and salty old veteran who has seen it all but is still overjoyed at each new day, such is his hunger and enthusiasm for life. Alternately profane and poetic (and sometimes both simultaneously), Happy emerges as the gentle voice of reason in Burkett's examination of the power of memory to both heal and imprison. 

 That Burkett manages to combine that examination with a dazzling display of his prowess in puppetry, all the while continuing to expand its frontiers to turn what was once considered a ghetto into his own personal empire, is proof positive of his genius. 

Best of all, his audience continues to grow with him. It's easy to accept the raunchy dialogue and behaviour in a Burkett show (this time, he even explores full-frontal nudity), once you've learned that while his marionettes are not made of skin and bone, 

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