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written and directed by Ronnie Burkett

Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes, Factory Theatre Mainspace, Toronto

January 24-March 4, 2012;

National Arts Centre, Ottawa

March 14-April 1

“The End of Humanity”

Ronnie Burkett’s latest show may be his most succinct and most disturbing one yet.  Penny Plain begins with newsflashes from various sources of multiple global disasters.  An insidiously adaptable flu pandemic has already killed tens of millions of people around the world.  Sea levels have risen so high that Iceland is now under water.  Humanity has responded with panic, violence and suicide.  The one island of calm in all this turmoil is the boarding house run by the blind woman Penny Plain, born in 1928, who is listening to the television news with her animal companion Geoffrey, a dog.

Penny has always treated Geoffrey as a gentleman and so he has become, but just when she thinks she has someone to sit with her until the end of the world, Geoffrey decides that this is his last chance to live in the world as a man.  In answer to an advert for a dog, she receives visits from a randy chihuahua and a slatternly poodle, but she finally settles on Tuppence, a human girl who tries to convince Penny she is a dog.  Tuppence needs shelter and comfort after her desperate parents hanged her brother and themselves thinking she would follow. 

Interleaved with this main plot are the stories of other lodgers.  A negative parallel to the relationship of Penny and Geoffrey is that of the perpetually complaining old woman Queenie and her perpetually angry daughter Jubilee.  Roaming the house with her walker (it’s hard to remember this is a marionette), Queenie screeches after Jubilee only when she needs her bum wiped.  Jubilee seems to release her pent-up rage through the occasional murder. 

Meanwhile, a woman named Evelyn (whom Penny thinks of as a second Eve) is so desperate that she can never have children she turns to the famous puppeteer Geppetto Jones make her a wooden puppet that will turn into a real boy through her love as did Geppetto’s own boy Pinocchio.  Burkett gave us the story of a famous puppeteer in his last show Billy Twinkle.  But to see him stage the meeting of Geppetto with his now grown-up son “Pino”, archetypal figures of the puppet and his maker, is so uncanny it send shivers up your spine.

Then there is Penny’s shy banker who in face of the apocalypse finally admits he longs to dress as a woman, while two evangelical Americans, dressed in Vegas-style camouflage jumpsuits, seek safety across the border and a place to have sex as they wait for the Biblical Second Coming.  We are glad that Oliver, the boy in the gas-mask and avowed dog-killer, does not believe that Tuppence is a dog.

How thin is the veneer of civilization that give human beings their humanity?  We haven’t been on earth all that long, yet we’ve treated it with so little respect it has started to strike back.  Penny is glad when she smells the increasing number of flowers and vines that begin to take over her house and take it back to nature.

Goethe wrote in his Bildungsroman of 1796, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (“Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship”), “Wer die Menschen behandelt wie sie sind, macht sie schlechter. Wer sie aber behandelt wie sie sein könnten, macht sie besser” (“Whoever treats people as they are makes them worse.  Whoever treats them as they could be makes them better”).  Burkett expands this idea from how we treat each other to how we treat the world and what we create.  When Evelyn first sees what Geppetto has made she rejects it because she sees only the diverse components that make up the puppet--what it is, not what it could be.  Geoffrey is better and Jubilee is worse because of how they are treated.  What finally happens is so disturbing because it juxtaposes the good and bad sides of Goethe’s Enlightenment notion and introduces the fact that outside our own sphere of influence, we have no control over how people and the world are treated and must confront the effects, whatever they may be.

As usual, Burkett’s marionettes are each works of art that seem to breathe.  Penny herself is especially expressive, taking on various nuances of feeling--wistfulness, regret, interest, resignation--simply from the way Burkett holds her head.  His recurrence to hand-puppets for a flashback of Penny’s past is brilliant in execution and as a reference to the history of his craft.

If we leave Penny Plain filled more with dread than hope, it is because Burkett’s story has such profound resonances.  Ronnie Burkett is celebrating 25 years of treating marionettes as they could be--not merely dolls on strings but as vessels to communicate uncomfortable ideas and complex emotions.  He also treats his audiences as what they could be--receptive, imaginative, inquisitive--and we are all the much better for it.                           

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Geoffrey and Penny Plain. ©2011 Trudie Lee.

For tickets, visit www.factorytheatre.ca or www.nac-cna.ca.