Burkett proves strange, elusive and unmissable
Provenance's obsession with beauty is gorgeous

Liz Nicholls
The Edmonton Journal
Saturday, November 01, 2003

Provenance Rating 4 1/2

EDMONTON - There's something thrillingly radical, maybe even perverse, about any marionette play that opens with the line "follow my voice." The voice? Not the 16 strings that transfer the most delicate, expressive nuances from the brain of the puppeteer to his exquisite cast?

But then, it's not as if Ronnie Burkett hasn't already served warning, internationally, that marionettes aren't to be trifled with. The puppet virtuoso who did a lot of dazzling and outraging was never content with either. He turned out to be a restless, probing spirit who ventured onto tiny stages with his actors to test the dark political implications of the man-marionette relationship (Tinka's New Dress), its metaphysical resonances (Street Of Blood), its emotional moorage (Happy).

Burkett's status as a true theatre renegade is confirmed with Provenance, premiering at Theatre Network before setting forth into the world. It is a strange and wonderful experience. It's genuinely experimental. It's wildly challenging, difficult, sometimes elusive, unnerving, possibly a bit much, and absolutely unmissable. How often does that happen in the theatre?

He's always known how to imbue his puppets with life, and their stories with dramatic urgency. In Provenance Burkett has learned how to take from his basswood colleagues, not just give. And what he takes is the conventional dramatic view that individual characters own their stories in the onstage moment. Burkett is present as never before, in a theatre of poetry where long elaborate fantasias, sometimes in verse, take the characters' voices out of individual speech and into memory, the imagery of the timeless past. Their back stories are involved, dark, ugly, full of abuse and tragedy across a turbulent century. This, as in a canvas, is the characters' "provenance," a history of ownership. The back stories consume the characters. In fact that's exactly what Provenance proposes: a view of character as back story-run-rampant. The stage landscape this creates is genuinely bizarre: lush (occasionally over-ripe) with words, gorgeous with Art Nouveau ochre and silver curves, red lacquer, silk charmeuse; but a harsh, unlovely emotional terrain nonetheless.

Every character in Provenance is marked by the obsession with beauty, whether as pursuer or the beautiful "object" of the pursuit. Pity Beane is an unworldly Canadian art history major who arrives, like a homespun plain-jane version of a Henry James heroine, at a Viennese brothel in search of a beautiful boy in a painting of mysterious provenance.

Like plump prairie housewife Mrs. Edna Rural in Street Of Blood, pear-shaped Pity is ours, from her retro-chic bangs to her Blundstones, the outsider inured to exclusion, the one who yearns for beauty and has never been desired herself. To see Pity turn on her heel, slump her shoulders, fling herself apologetically into a chair, write invisible quotation marks in the air, is to know you're in the presence of a master puppeteer. Later she will skate, and it's so magical you'll gasp.

But that's true of all of them. Leda, the brothel madam, takes us from old age, with its essence of self-knowledge ("the first strokes are the soul of art, the rest is veneer"), back to her wild young days as chanteuse/ show girl in Paris, beauty on display for men who will sell their souls -- quite literally, as rollerskating monkey Plato demonstrates -- for it.

To Pity's thundering denunciation of the hypocrisies of art criticism, Burkett counterposes Leda's survey of 20th-century art movements as adjustments in the erotic sightlines, and it's as intellectually playful as anything by Stoppard. Leda has spent her life deflecting real connections from the beautiful surfaces of her many selves, berated all the while by her conscience, an amusingly exasperated sacred cow called Auntie Sari (present as a "head rig" strapped to Burkett's own head by a band).

The men of the play -- the old American Jew Herschel Flechtheim, drawn back to Vienna after 63 years of unrequited love, and Dooley, Leda's debonair trophy husband -- know something about the price of pursuing beauty. So does the boy of the painting, beautiful and tragic because of that fact: "Beauty washed me with salt in every wound."

Burkett and his marionettes share flesh, expression and thought as never before. His hand might stand in for theirs, to wipe off spectacles, represent a terrifying assault on innocence, or something more ambiguously cosmic, reassuringly resting on a head, moving a stationary figure into place. When the puppets leave the room to disappear into the lovely cabinetry of the set, their voices linger, in his.

The characters move fluidly from one form to another, marionette to hand puppet to head rig, as Provenance explores the dark destructive dimensions of our attraction to beauty and its license to objectify. About art itself, Provenance seems more ambivalent. Is it a mirror for our own aspirations? If so, Provenance suspects it's distorted, and maybe even saps our own emotional rapport with our fellow man.

Disturbing thoughts for an artist whose own tireless quest for beauty in creation has galvanized a unique marionette theatre. But then, that's part of the excitement. With Burkett you always have the sense of a prodigious talent fretting about, worrying, testing the nature of that gift. He never takes it for granted, and that is beautiful.

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