Canadian puppeteer Burkett reinvents theatre for adults

Canadian puppeteer Burkett reinvents theatre for adults
LEAH EICHLER

TORONTO, FEB 20: Happy, a painfully sad theatre production questioning whether happiness is the lot of only a select few, has moved audiences to tears in both Canada and Germany and will open in London in June.

Ordinarily, there would be nothing unusual about people weeping as actors explore painful human frailties, emotions and experience, but this performance has no actors only puppets.

This will not surprise those familiar with the Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes. The puppeteer, who has performed across Canada, England, Ireland, Germany, the United States and Australia, has designed a signature brand of theatre marrying serious text with a medium usually dismissed as childish.

‘‘All I wanted to do was discuss humanity, and the form I am using to discuss it is non-human. It’s funny, isn’t it?’’ the man seen as the bad boy of the puppet world asked mischievously.

Burkett consistently breaks age-old rules, including by being in full view on stage during productions. ‘‘Any puppet book will tell you that you don’t have a puppet walk in, sit down and start talking to the audience. Keep it moving. Get him in, have minimal dialogue and then get him out again,’’ the 43-year-old puppeteer explained.

His productions are exactly the opposite: some characters engage in long monologues and others do not move at all.

Happy, the third play of a trilogy that started with Tinka’s New Dress, followed by Street of Blood, is anything but juvenile. The story is related by chronically optimistic Happy, who wanders through the grief-filled episodes of people’s lives.The protagonist, Carla, is a young, aspiring poet whose boyfriend dies early in the show. Overwhelmed with sorrow, Carla discovers the dead can be kept alive, but in limbo, when those who live refuse to let go of their memories.

‘‘I wanted to look at the damage of memory,’’ Burkett said, but to get his point across he believes he had to get humans out of the way.

‘‘Actors would have brought so much layering to the story, but puppets exist only to convey those characters and emotions with you. And, because they don’t breathe, you have to breathe for them.’’

Marrying serious text to the art of puppetry is nothing new. Burkett cites the Czech puppet tradition as a forebear to his brand of theatre.

‘‘The Czech puppet tradition has influenced me incredibly,’’ he said. Tinka’s New Dress was based on illegal underground puppet shows, called Daisies, that were held in the former Czechoslovakia under Nazi occupation.

In 1993, in a nod to these shows so-called because daisies can grow in the dark Burkett started the Daisy Theatre in Calgary, an improv theatre where he would test market new puppets and characters. He runs a one-man show, writing the plays, creating the puppets, designing the stage and performing the parts solo. Inside his head at any given time are dozens of voices and seven and a half hours of dialogue.‘‘Try being in my head sometime,’’ he said, laughing.