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written and directed by Ronnie Burkett

Ronnie Burkett’s Theatre of Marionettes, Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto

January 25-March 3, 2001

“Happy is One of Burkett’s Finest”

Master marionettist Ronnie Burkett’s latest work, “Happy”, which premiered at the du Maurier World Stage festival last year, is the final instalment of his “Memory Dress Trilogy” comprising “Tinka’s New Dress” (1994) and “Street of Blood” (1999).  “Happy” just may be the greatest of the three.  While still treating essential themes of human existence, the play is more clearly structured and more fully explores and integrates into the action Burkett’s surprising interactions between marionette and manipulator.  Irrespective of medium, Burkett proves once again with this work that he is probably Canada’s greatest living theatre artist. 

“Happy” is set among the inhabitants of a rooming house.  The cast includes, among others, the World War II veteran Happy, our main guide through the play; young Carla, a would-be poet, and her husband Drew; the aged sad-sack Raymond, who does errands for the household; Lucille, whom Raymond long pined for, now an earthy, chain-smoking old woman in capri pants and open blouse; and the blue-haired, faux-Filipino hairdresser Ricky, who has escaped Moose Jaw for the anonymity of the big city and lives with his unloved, obese boyfriend, Kenny.  As we have come to expect from Burkett, all the characters are exquisitely sculpted, their fixed expressions seeming to change with minute alterations of posture and gesture under Bill Williams’s detailed lighting.  Burkett’s manipulations and voicings are so individual and so precise his marionettes convey more character and more emotion that many a human actor I’ve seen.  

Early on in the play, Carla’s husband Drew suddenly dies.  From this point on the play is structured around Carla’s passage through Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief with interludes for each stage performed by one of Burkett’s most outrageous characters, Antoine Marionette, the emcee of the Grey Cabaret.  Each stage is both marked and mocked by performers of the Cabaret like the cellist Jacqueline Dupression, the opera star Maureen Massey-Ferguson and the American crooner Perry Homo.  The persona of the emcee allows Burkett ample opportunity for hilarious improvised remarks, taking well-deserved swipes at the CBC, the Governor General’s Awards, the Stratford Festival “where actors can’t walk and talk at the same time” and “Larry’s Party” (“Now THAT was depressing!”).  As should be evident, Burkett uses Kübler-Ross to structure the action while at the same time ridiculing the notion that human grief (or anything human, for that matter) can be so easily systematized.  Carla’s final stage of grieving has been suggested as her own all along, despite its deviation from the five stages theory.           

Burkett, without a puppet for medium, begins the play by saying, “I like to dream of colour--not in colour, but about colour”.  This begins an opposition between life as colour and death as greyness that continues throughout the play.  Grief, a kind of abstention from life, is also grey.  Ultimately, the play focusses on the dilemma of desiring to hold on to the memory of a loved one and the necessity of letting go, and by extension the need to let go of any past in order to go forward.  This is encapsulated in an intensely moving episode Happy recalls when a fellow soldier convinces a concentration camp survivor not to succumb to the death that surrounds and haunts her but to let him be a become for her a new reason to live.  Three-quarters through the play it becomes clear that many of the characters “living” in the rooming house” are, in fact, only vivid memories that the living have not yet relinquished.  What are we really?  How can we be happy not knowing?  The title character concludes, despite the glimpses into the profound unhappiness around him, that it is because of rain that we have the colours of the rainbow to cherish.

The set Burkett has designed is a marvel of symbolism and economy.  It appears as a large sideboard, which, when revolved, is the set for the Grey Cabaret positioned above a beautiful model of the rooming house.  Whenever a death has been acknowledged, Burkett produces a grey plate to place in the racks of the sideboard--a sign of something simultaneously concrete and fragile.  This sideboard and the floor are of blond wood and all of the marionettes’ strings are white to set off the colour of life and memory the characters represent.  And as Burkett tells us, "Wood remembers".

Burkett’s interactions with his creations, which were so jolting in “Street of Blood”, are here integrated into the regular flow of the action.  Repeatedly, marionettes lean against their creator’s leg in need of support or in gestures of joy.  Burkett expands the range of his creations from stationary dolls who must be moved by hand, to a full-sized puppet manipulated from within, to disembodied heads of characters, to (in brilliant move) traditional Punch and Judy hand-puppets to act out Carla’s stage of anger, the Carla puppet ultimately battering Burkett’s bare hand in grief at her loss.  The levels of metatheatricality Burkett calls forth with such simple means are mind-boggling.  Eeriest of all, Burkett experiments with having his creations remain still while he signals their conversations through solely through changes in his voice. 

Ronnie Burkett is a marvel and his latest play is as profound as it is moving and humorous.  It is also continues Burkett’s inquiry into the relation of creator and created, inherent in his craft, but here made explicit through the play’s theme and its enactment.  The Japanese have no qualms about regarding Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1725) as their greatest playwright despite the fact that he wrote almost exclusively for the puppet theatre.  Burkett has so broken the bounds of what puppet theatre constitutes, we, too, should have no qualms about recognizing his greatness, not just in the realm of puppet theatre, but in theatre in general. 

Photo: Happy and Ronnie Burkett. ©2001 Trudie Lee.