Time to suspend all your disbelief

An American has turned puppetry on its head with his radical approach to storytelling.
by MARY BRENNAN

At the age of seven, Ronnie Burkett knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life. For one day, doubtless flicked by the finger of fate, the family encyclopaedia fell open at the page entitled puppets. Young Ronnie was smitten, captivated, enslaved. "I looked at it, at the picture of someone surrounded by all these characters, and I thought 'that's what I'll do for the rest of my life'.

"Indeed, here I sit, doing exactly that. I mean, it could have fallen open to proctologist. Who knows? It could have been a different career entirely." A darkly roguish chuckle rises up and closes off the sentence before Burkett can muse merrily on, playing around with other p-words that could have spelled professional disaster for an adult who freely admits he's still a loner on the inside, and still finds the outside world confusing and "a bit scarey".

Now, whatever his parents, or the other inhabitants of Medicine Head, Alberta (which did not, by the way, have a practising puppeteer in its midst), envisaged Burkett doing with his calling, it's unlikely they imagined characters like Edna Rural or Esme Massengill. Or a scenario like Street of Blood, which ends its internationally successful tour at Glasgow's Tramway this weekend.

In it Edna pricks her finger while quilting, causing an image of Christ's face to materialise on the cloth. Her son, Eden, a karaoke-singing, gay terrorist, with vengeance on his mind, comes home. Esme, an ageing Hollywood actress, who just happens to be a vampire, rolls into town looking for rejuvenation. Botox won't do: it has to be blood. You couldn't have a more radical, disconcerting deployment of puppets, short of Sooty and Sweep turning out to be crackheads. Even then, you're several twists and issues short of what Burkett explores with his Theatre of Marionettes. "What I've strived to do," he says "is create a theatre of humanity and none of the actors are human."

Street of Blood addresses need, appetite, hunger, both physical and emotional, at pressingly relevant social, political and personal levels. It confronts those actions, those types of folk who callously drain the life-blood out of communities and people. It twists a knife-edge of satirical insight in the jugular of self-interest and cover-up, be it Esme's vampiric exploitation of her celebrity status, or the contaminated blood supply scandal that caused outrage in his native Canada. Religion, Aids, adoption, contemporary bloodlust, they all enter the lists of Burkett's concerns, and they all feature in the writing that powers his puppet plays.

Burkett committed to puppetry before he knew what was entailed in the making and staging of productions. That probably proved a blessing. It meant he didn't follow any guidelines about suitable scripts and suitable characters, with "suitable translating as appropriate for entertaining under-fives at children's parties".

He looked inside his head, and there he found fairy tales and fantasies, a sense of humour influenced by the Carry On films that he grew up with, and, like a perpetually, spinning glitter-ball, the camp Hollywood culture that has a sultry cigarette in one hand, ruby lippers on its feet, and all kinds of passion, romance, and reckless promises on its lips. Oh, and a tragic revolver loaded
with jealousy in an inside pocket or teensy, spangled clutch bag.

Burkett's fascinated immersion in all these genres was accelerated by the same impulse that connected him to puppetry. He was, he says, a "loner child". Though he could read films, literature, and symbolism, and delight in it all, whether it was glamorous or grotesque, he couldn't read the real world with a similar ease or pleasure. The adult's increasing success, and the awards, of which there are several, haven't really altered that. "I think I'm still a loner, though I am, publicly, gregarious. Put a beer in my hand and I'll tell a tale, y'know. But, for me, the outside world is still confusing, a bit scarey, and I don't really understand it. So, being able to shrink it, with puppetry, and examine it that way, present it to an audience and say 'here's what I think. What do you think?', is very appealing.

"It appealed to me when I was a child, because I could do it all myself. I could make these things, talk for these things, could have them talk to each other. That initial hook is what keeps me going every day, with a little more insight, now. It's the same appeal of taking the big world and condensing it until it's understandable."

There's still the business of conveying that appeal to the adult audience he writes and performs for. The key to that, it seems, is not so much the craft of manipulating the puppets, but of manipulating us, the spectators. Burkett genially explains: "Unless the audience starts breathing for a puppet, for Edna Rural, say, she's not going to come to life. So I've had to learn how to control an audience's breathing. It is a technique. It's to do with acting. I walk on stage every night deciding 'you're going to care about this character. You may not agree with Edna Rural, but you will care about her'. That's acting, I think." The Canadian theatre scene agrees with him. "I never used the words actor or writer about myself, you know. I always just said puppeteer. Then they started saying 'you're a playwright. You're an actor'. That freed me up. I morphed from just being a puppeteer."

He laughs, maybe because most actors and writers don't spend months on end sculpting their characters' faces into shape, or whittling arms, legs, and torsos. Or maybe it's because, so far, he's been in the spotlight by proxy: channelling aspects of himself through puppets that can open up in ways he, himself, finds hard to do.

He's about to face that challenge with his next production, a one-man show without puppets. "It's six characters, I'm playing them all, and they're all puppeteers. It's a world I happen to know, and what a bunch of freaks and oddballs they are, believe me. It's wildly funny, very dark. Very mid-life, dare I say, 'cos I couldn't stand on stage and do an ageing, bad-boy show, where I talk about everyone I've slept with, then blame my mother, there's enough of those around already."

There are not many puppet shows, however, that are as provocative, as screamingly funny, or as poignant and touching as the ones Burkett creates. The last ever performances of Street of Blood at Tramway, Glasgow, from tomorrow until Sunday at 8pm.

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