In a few hours, Burkett will leave this quiet oasis and walk to work, cutting down to the shore so he has an unobstructed view of the waterfront’s famous white half shells as he approaches them. “It’s one of those pinch-me moments,” he explains. “You go, ‘How did a puppet show from Medicine Hat get to the Sydney Opera House?’” A moment of pride gives way to gentle self-mockery: “I mean, it’s just a puppet show.”
In the pantheon of Canadian pride, the fact that one of the world’s greatest puppeteers hails from a small city in southern Alberta is somewhat akin to our propensity for winning Olympic medals in trampoline: our satisfaction is tempered by doubts about whether anyone else participates past the age of eight. But Burkett’s lack of peers demonstrates that he has essentially invented, or at least reinvented, the genre of serious puppetry. Since he founded the Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes in 1986, his one-man shows have grappled with kid-unfriendly themes ranging from the Holocaust to AIDS to art history, and over time his puppets have shed their novelty status. To put it simply, his marionettes act. They emote, sometimes holding audiences in thrall while simply standing around onstage and talking to one another, as human actors would.
By the late ’90s, critics were viewing Burkett’s productions as plays rather than puppet shows. “Perhaps the sculpting, manipulation, and stringing of marionettes only need reviewing when they are bad,” Andrew Periale wrote in The Puppetry Journal in 2000. “Thanks to Burkett’s mastery of his craft, and his personal charisma as a performer, it is easy to look beyond these details to the text.” Burkett’s increasing recognition as a playwright has brought him a wider audience of regular theatregoers, many of whom would never otherwise go to a puppet show, and has established him as part of the mainstream theatre community in Canada. Last November, he won the $100,000 Siminovitch Prize in Theatre, which is awarded in turn to a director, a playwright, and a designer over a three-year cycle. Perhaps more telling than his victory, as a designer, is the fact that he is the only person to have been nominated in all three categories.
Burkett’s current production, Billy Twinkle, Requiem for a Golden Boy, which premiered in Edmonton before touring the United Kingdom and Australia, returned in March for shows in Calgary, Montreal, and Toronto. In the show, the title character, a cruise ship puppeteer facing a mid-life crisis after being fired from his job, is compelled by the ghost of his dead mentor to re-enact key scenes from his life — in puppet form, needless to say — in order to remember and rekindle the passion he once felt for his craft. As Burkett puts it, “It’s a show about a puppeteer who’s doing a puppet show about a puppeteer.” The plot offered him a perfect vehicle for such technical wizardry as marionettes manipulating tiny marionettes of their own. But it was also a way of exploring the forces that have shaped his career and his vision for the form’s future. And it provides an excellent entry point for those of us whose prior exposure to grown-up puppetry begins and ends with Kermit the Frog.
The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, recorded the earliest known use of string puppets, in Egyptian fertility rituals honouring Osiris. “The genitals of these figures are made almost as big as the rest of their bodies,” he recounted, “and they are pulled up and down by strings as the women carry them around the villages.” Since then, puppets of various types have been an almost constant presence in cultures around the world, cyclically sustained by two divergent forces: their usefulness as mouthpieces for subversive truths and taboo topics, and the endless fascination they hold for children.
A century ago, puppetry in North America was mostly kid stuff, as it is now. But that changed for a time after Tony Sarg, a Guatemalan-born German who was inspired by marionette shows he’d seen in England, began staging productions in the United States during the ’20s. His performances ushered in what is now thought of as the golden age of American puppetry, placing him at the root of a family tree whose branches aficionados still trace with care. “Sarg begat Bil Baird, who did the Sound of Music puppets and hired me when I was nineteen,” says Burkett.
During the American golden age, countless marionette companies criss-crossed the continent. “My main mentor, Martin Stevens, toured in the ’30s and ’40s with Cleopatra, the Passion play, Joan of Arc,” Burkett says. “Really haunting, naturalistic marionette shows, primarily for adults.” The end of this era coincided with the rise of television, shortly after the Second World War, though television didn’t kill puppetry — quite the opposite. Puppets (and, soon enough, Muppets) were cheap and effective babysitters, and their popularity soared. But they had moved back into the domain of children.
In Billy Twinkle, an aching sense of loss for the bygone glories of the golden age haunts the title character’s mentor, Sid Diamond, a crotchety Shakespearean puppeteer in the mould of Stevens. Other characters bring to life the various trends that have buffeted the world of puppetry over the decades: Billy’s adenoidal rival, Benji, for example, stages puppet shows so avant-garde they no longer feature any puppets. Billy’s cruise ship routine, meanwhile, channels a rich history of racy cabaret marionette acts with a lineage that may well stretch back to Osiris. But at the heart of the drama lies the strained connection between Billy and Sid — not just the conflict between high and low culture, but the endless tension between old and new, and the underlying pursuit of immortality inherent in the mentor-protege relationship.
Burkett’s obsession with puppetry began (his official bio tells us) at age seven, when he flipped open the World Book Encyclopedia and landed on “Puppets.” This glib telling fails to highlight that, for a young boy in Medicine Hat, Alberta, “you couldn’t find a bigger vacuum to have a weirder obsession.” Burkett didn’t see his first live puppet show until years later, by which time he’d obsessively studied every marionette-related book he could get his hands on. In Billy Twinkle, the young boy from Moose Jaw finally gets a chance to meet his peers and heroes when his doting parents put him on a plane, alone, at age twelve, to attend a puppet festival in Detroit. This is not autobiographical, Burkett insists: “I actually went when I was fourteen, and it was in Lansing.” The temptation to view the production as autobiographical is so pervasive that repeated public statements and a disclaimer in the Sydney program have had little effect. “Everyone now thinks I was diddled by a businessman in a motor lodge at age fifteen,” Burkett says with an exasperated smile. “And they go, ‘Oh, poor Ronnie, that explains everything.’ Well, actually, it doesn’t.”
