ALWAYS STRINGS ATTACHED
Puppeteer says he’s not mellowing
When Ronnie Burkett is spoken of as a great Canadian artist in the same breath as Robert Lepage, few are likely to be more surprised than Burkett himself. The impact of his work on audiences, he says, is “still the biggest mystery in the world to me.”
Speaking to the Montreal Gazette from Toronto as his latest show, The Daisy Theatre, prepares to come to Centaur Theatre, the master puppeteer from Medicine Hat, Alta., says: “There’s a thing that happens in my work that is the most beautiful thing: moments of absolute silence when you know that the audience — a group of adults watching a puppet show — is listening to a character telling their story. None of my mentors ever told me that was a possibility with puppetry. You can hold people on a breath with this little wooden jointed doll on strings.”
The largely improvised cabaret that is The Daisy Theatre has been holding audiences on a breath since Burkett began touring it in 2013, tangling in its wake a raft of five-star reviews.
There are also the delighted audience members who return again and again to enjoy the antics of lounge singer Rosemary Focaccia, Canada’s oldest and worst actress Esme Massengill, fairy child Schnitzel, or any of the scores of beautifully crafted puppets he might decide to reach for on a given evening.
The fun-filled unpredictability of The Daisy Theatre represents a shift in Burkett’s 40-plus-year career, the roots of which lie in his being captivated by the Lonely Goatherd scene from The Sound of Music when he was 10. (Its creator, Bill Baird, was later to be one of Burkett’s mentors.)
“I spent the bulk of my career working from scripts, and they got more serious and darker,” Burkett explains. “The show I did just before The Daisy Theatre (2011’s Penny Plain) was about the end of civilization and everybody dies. I thought: I’ve got to lighten up. So that’s when The Daisy Theatre came about. I just wanted to play again and make puppets that delighted me. It returned me to having nonsensical fun.”
And yet the show’s very title is a callback to that earlier, darker phase of Burkett’s career.
His 1994 breakthrough hit, Tinka’s New Dress, was largely inspired by underground cabarets that sprang up in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia and were nicknamed “daisies” in reference to that flower’s ability to push through concrete.
“Yes, there’s a real authentic undertone,” Burkett says of The Daisy Theatre’s dark roots.
“How many characters do I have? Fifty-three puppets in the show now? That’s a lot of personalities to call out and be themselves, and you have to let them be as dark or weird or confused as they sometimes are.”
By way of example, Burkett cites two puppets that have become favourites with Daisy Theatre audiences. There’s the standup Jesus who kvetches about his parents and how much he hates Easter.
“He’s wildly funny,” Burkett says, “but I also know some people are like, ‘Uh-uh, too far, too far.’ “
And then there’s Edna Whirl, “a confused little farm widow from a made-up town called Turnip Corners, Alta. She’s slightly racist at times, but not in an intentional way — more in a generational and regional way. She’s a commentary on a certain kind of Canada that I know.”
As anybody who has followed Burkett’s career can testify, he has never shied away from uncomfortable subjects, whether it’s the Holocaust in Tinka’s New Dress, AIDS in Streets of Blood, or mental illness in 10 Days on Earth. Once the self-confessed “bad boy of puppetry,” Burkett laughs and says he’s “a bit too long in the tooth to be a bad boy now.” So does this mean he’s mellowed?
“I should hope not. They’re not times to be mellow in, are they?”
Burkett recalls how, when the results of the last presidential election came through, he came offstage to find his cellphone had been inundated with panicked calls from puppetry students he had been teaching in the U.S.
“All of them were saying, ‘Do you have a guest room? I’ve gotta leave this country!’ and I said, ‘Actually, no, if you’re going to be an artist, now’s the time to find a voice and use it in this form. Use allegory and metaphor and buck up. We’re past doing the Muppet Show.’ ”
Audiences are unlikely to ever mistake Burkett’s work for the Muppet Show. The Daisy Theatre is restricted to age 16 and over, and not just because one of his puppets, stripper Dolly Wiggler, gets her kit off every night. There’s the salty language, the sometimes uncomfortable subject matter, and what the publicity describes as the show’s “seat-of-the-pants” unpredictability, which includes calling audience members up onto the stage to interact with Burkett’s rogues gallery.
And it might be argued that part of the impact of Burkett’s work has been its tapping into puppetry’s general capacity to disturb, as in, say, the Saw film series, the Anthony Hopkins thriller Magic, or the killer-dummy sequence of the 1940s classic Dead of Night.
Does Burkett ever knowingly play up to pupaphobia?
“If the character is sinister, I’ll play it that way,” he says.
“I don’t intentionally play upon the creepy puppet thing. I’m not going to just say puppets are creepy.”
Just as I’m about to hastily downplay any intention of suggesting Burkett’s life’s vocation is steeped in creepiness, he makes a startling admission.
“I am deathly afraid of ventriloquist’s dummies. If I’m in a room with them, I can’t look at them. Oddly enough, one of the most popular acts in The Daisy Theatre and one of the favourite things I’ve ever done is a ventriloquist act, a marionette with a ventriloquist’s dummy. So it’s funny to me that I’m creeped out by ventriloquist’s dummies, but as soon as I turn one into a marionette act, I’m able to bridge that fear.”
So does this mean he’s cured of his phobia offstage, too?
“Oh no, I’m still creeped out by them. And when you mentioned Magic, about the murderous dummy taking over your mind and making you kill people? Ugh! Who knows what’s in store for me?
“Maybe I’ll go crazy one day and the puppets will tell me to kill everyone.”