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by the Old Trout Puppet Workshop,

Young Centre, Toronto

October 16, 2008

After a sold-out run in 2007, Famous Puppets Death Scenes by the Calgary-based Old Trout Puppet Workshop returns to the Young Centre for another bout of puppet massacre and mayhem.  The show brings all kinds of references to mind--Terry Gilliam’s animations for Monty Python, Edward Gorey’s tale of The Gashlycrumb Tinies, the Tiger Lilies’ opera Shockheaded Peter--all of which revel in the ghastly demises of the innocent or proud in pseudo-Victorian settings.  

Twenty-two scenes of puppet deaths in only 80 minutes might not seem particularly edifying, but there you would be wrong.  The show’s conceit is that Nathanial Tweak, himself a puppet looking rather like Sam Jaffe in Lost Horizon, has supposedly scoured the world for the most significant death scenes in the history of puppetry and has gathered them together to help the audience come to terms with its own mortality.  After the hilarious and oddly frequent excerpts from The Feverish Heart, that each conclude with a puppet’s head bashed in by a gigantic fist, or the melodramatic multiple suicides and murder that end The Swede of Donnylargan, Tweak’s goal seems ridiculous.  Yet, several scenes are both beautiful and serious.  In The Last Whale all we see is an enormous eye open and close.  In Lucille Arabesque a puppeteer reacts solemnly to the “death” of a life-sized puppet of an aged woman.  In King Jeff the Magnificent, the title character seen from above leaps up and sails beyond the atmosphere into space.         

           

The Old Trouts bring a dazzling range of invention to scenes that range in style from silent film to television kiddie shows, from Noh plays to science fiction.  Inevitably some excerpts are more effective than others. The Cruel Sea was lost on me and seemed to repeat the dismemberment by natural forces already shown in The Forgotten Dish.  Most, however, like the gorgeous pop-up book of Never Say It Again are unforgettable.  Strangely, amid all the laughter, you do find yourself asking what it means when a puppet loses its “life” and why such an obvious fiction can sometimes be so ludicrous and other times so moving.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2008-10-08.

Photo: Nathanial Tweak. ©Old Trout Puppet Workshop.