Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
✭✭✭✩✩
written and directed by the Old Trout Puppet Workshop
Old Trout Puppet Workshop, Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto
November 27-December 15, 2012
Narrator: “Most people only experience occasional whiffs of contentment”.
Anyone who saw the Old Trout Puppet Workshop’s Famous Puppet Death Scenes in 2007 or 2008 will likely rush to see the troupe’s latest creation Ignorance, now playing at the Berkeley Street Theatre. While the Old Trouts are still extremely inventive, Ignorance has neither the tight structure for the wide variety of puppetry styles of its predecessor and does not fully explore its subject.
Admittedly, the subject of Ignorance is enormous for a show only 75 minutes long. The OTPW website claims: “Ignorance is a puppet documentary about the evolution of happiness, from the dark howls of our prehistoric ancestors to the ethereal future – the Old Trouts will try to explain where we went wrong, and how we might find our way once again”. In fact, the show looks only at the evolution of happiness among our prehistoric ancestors and shows where we went wrong, but at no time shows this evolution as it leads to “the ethereal future” or shows “how we might find our way one again”. The OTPW should either change its show description or add a second act to complete what it claims it will do.
The action for Ignorance takes place in a “cave” that looks more like part of the collapsed ribcage of some prehistoric beast. A skin has been stretched across a back ovoid section between the bones and here Jamie Nesbit’s projects are screened along with animations by Paul Dutton and his crew. Where Famous Puppet Death Scenes had an onstage narrator, Ignorance has a voiceover from an unseen narrator as in old-fashioned documentaries done in an amusingly pompous style by Judd Palmer. The Narrator ponders the sad “fact” that “the average person experiences only 14 minutes of true happiness in his or her lifetime”. As he ponders puppeteers depict a small boy eyeing a yellow balloon painted with a 1970s style smiley face. As in Death Scenes, the smiley face balloon soon wraps its string around the boy’s neck, strangles him and carries him off. This is a great image of life asphyxiated by the pursuit of false happiness, but the show never explores its intriguing ramifications.
Searching for the answer to why we are so unhappy, our Narrator takes us back to the Stone Age, or as the title on the screen proclaims it, the “Age of Ignorance,” to find the answer. Here we meet Adam. As is fitting for a Stone Age man, his face is made of two stones with the flat parts together to make a mouth, long matted hair and he three-fingered twig for a hand. This being the Age of Ignorance, burning his hand in the fire once isn’t enough for him to learn that fire causes pain. Soon a blonde-haired Eve arrives with whom he shares a freshly crushed rat. But, of course, he happiness is not long-lived because soon an Alpha Male arrives, knocked Adam out and makes off with Eve.
To Eve the Narrator credits the invention of the imagination – the ability to long for more than what you have. This longing is played out on the screen as the Biblical scene of Eve biting the apple in Eden and giving it to Adam who gulps it down. Ah, but the bad side of imagination is that when unfulfilled it can cause despair. This is totality of the show’s analysis of happiness.
Whereas the Narrator of Death Scenes had assembled the 22 scenes for the purpose of inuring himself to his own coming demise, the scenes in Ignorance are not so closely knit. For no apparent reason, and contrary to the idea of tracing the evolution of happiness, scenes from the Stone Age alternate with scenes in the present – a man brutally parking his car between two others, a man trying to convince himself to commit suicide by jumping off a ledge, a getting caught in a smiley face balloon-making machine – that often have no relation to the Stone Age scenes except when once a modern Alpha Male senior steals an aged female from a weakling male.
At one point in the Stone Age, Eve begins painting a scene on the stretched skin and the Narrator notes in his typically dry fashion: “Here’s something interesting. Eve has just created Art”. Unfortunately, nothing comes of this – such as art as an outlet for the imagination, whether of hope or despair – that might tie up the loose ends of the show.
There is no faulting the three puppeteers – Nicolas Di Gaetano, Trevor Leigh and Viktor Lukawski – who, looking gleefully ridiculous in grey longjohns with single-horned cloth helmets, manipulate their various puppets with great precision and wit. Though the show is supposedly a “documentary”, much of the best humour derives from making us aware that the presence of the puppeteers. When Adam tries to kill a woolly mammoth with a rock, the puppet whose hand is the puppeteer’s hand, repeatedly hits the head not of the mammoth puppet but of the puppeteer, eventually smushing the rock all over the puppeteer’s face to make him aware that his mammoth puppet is supposed to die.
The puppet creations are ingenious. We all know hand puppets, but this is the first time I’ve seen foot puppets, rather like slippers, to play the cave rats. The Alpha Male is conceived of as a chest puppet, strapped across the belly of the puppeteer. The large version of the woolly mammoth is a man with mammoth legs on his own, a hairy hump for a headpiece and a trunk made up of bones and stones tied together. Unlike Ronnie Burkett, the Old Trouts do not present their puppets are artistic sculptures but as found objects turned to the use of puppetry. The single most enjoyable aspect of the show is to see three grown men who have clearly retained an intimate connection with their childlike selves so that they can freely scream and howl while one puppet batters another. And like children playing they way they used to play, most of the puppet interactions involve one puppet pounding on another – not so far removed from Punch and Judy but with a supposedly loftier agenda.
There is no doubt that Ignorance has some brilliant scenes, but its slapstick does become repetitive and tiresome and the complete neglect of the show’s initial raison d’être by the end is frustrating. The Old Trout website claims that the show was written by crowdsourcing: “our first attempt at what we’re calling Open Creation – the entire show has been written on the web for all to see or contribute”. We have to wonder if that is part of the reason the show is less coherent than the Old Trout’s previous shows. Let’s hope that the Old Trouts get back to giving us what they want us to see rather than giving us what their fans want to see which seems to amount to little else that one puppet beating up another.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Adam holding balloon. ©2012 Jason Stang Photography.
For tickets, visit www.canadianstage.com.
2012-11-28
Ignorance