Theatre Preview
THE LAST SUPPER OF ANTONIN CAREME
The Old Trout Puppet Workshop
Performed by Peter Balkwill, Steve Kenderes, Steve Pearce and Judd Palmer
Directed by David Lane
Runs January 28 to February 21
Big Secret Theatre (Epcor Centre)
Recipe for a Rodeo show:
Take one funky Calgary puppet troupe.
Combine with the life of a legendary 19th-century French chef.
Fold in a highfalutin theme about the pursuit of the sublime.
Add a splash of humour and a dash of the grotesque.
Drench the whole in a crazy sound design by Peter Moller (accept no substitutes).
Place in a preheated Big Secret Theatre.
And voila! You have a new puppetry pièce de résistance by the Old Trout Puppet Workshop.
Excuse the extended cooking metaphor, but the Trouts are obsessed with food these days. And not just any food, either, but the haute cuisine of that granddaddy of all great French chefs, the "cook of kings and king of cooks," Antonin Carême.
Now, if you’re not up on your cooking lore, you may need an introduction. Simply put, Carême (1783 - 1833) is to French cuisine what Molière is to French theatre. Not only was he the most famous chef of his day, cooking for England’s Prince Regent, Russia’s Czar Alexander I and the great French statesman Talleyrand – a new Carême biography calls him "the first celebrity chef" – he also wrote the 19th-century bible of French cooking, L’Art de la Cuisine Français, and is credited with designing the classic towering chef’s hat still worn today.
"He’s an interesting character," says the Trouts’ Judd Palmer, as he hunkers down for an interview in the company’s eponymous Inglewood workshop. "He was brought to the gates of Paris at the age of eight by his drunkard peasant father, who could no longer afford to keep him, and was told something grand like, ‘Go forth, young Antonin, and make your fortune with your wits!’"
He did. The boy found work as the apprentice to a cook in a humble eatery, where his innate talent eventually caught the eye of the master pastry chef Bailly, who took him under his wing. Bailly’s training led Carême to a position in the household of the gourmet Talleyrand and the beginning of a glorious gastronomic career.
The well-read Palmer first encountered Carême’s tale in an early edition of Larousse Gastronomique – "it’s a kick-ass old book," he says, "one of the best reads you’ll ever come across" – and what particularly struck him was the irony at the heart of Carême’s career. This inventor of the most refined and exquisite of cooking styles came of age during one of the bloodiest, most anarchic periods in history, which is often seen as marking the start of the modern age.
"Here you have this interesting set of circumstances – the invention of haute cuisine at the same moment that the French Revolution was happening," says Palmer.
For Palmer and his fellow puppeteer-philosophers, a play about that dichotomy seemed like the perfect way of dealing with a question they had been asking themselves.
"We wondered what relationship we have to the sublime today – whether we still have access to it," says Trout Steve Pearce. "Our modern mind-frame is very much rational and quantified, whereas the sublime tends to be qualitative, ethereal and mysterious."
"Food is an interesting metaphor for that," adds Palmer. "It can be utterly banal – a burger from McDonald’s – but there’s also an elevated stratum of food preparation and consumption, represented by that almost mythical three-star Michelin restaurant in Paris where we imagine there is this transcendent experience awaiting us."
In The Last Supper of Antonin Carême, the Old Trouts tell the story of the great chef through an imagined conflict between him and his first teacher, the unknown cook in the restaurant where he got his start, here imagined to be a jealous peasant. Their battle of haute cuisine versus populist grub is framed within the larger context of a religious allegory (hence the show’s title), which is suggested in the show’s décor – a set inside a set.
"There’s this intricate little baroque set that represents the world," says Palmer, "and the larger one outside it is heaven."
Ever since making their High Performance Rodeo debut four years ago with The Unlikely Birth of Istvan, the Trouts have been pushing the puppetry envelope à la Ronnie Burkett with every show and this production promises to be their most ambitious to date.
"We have a freakin’ absurd number of puppets for this one," says Palmer. "Somewhere between 20 and 30. We’ve gone nuts on that."
They include the troupe’s signature head puppets, which are worn on the puppeteer’s head with the arms operated by rods, and smaller hand puppets. A tour of the workshop reveals their inner workings. The head puppets are mounted on motorcycle helmets and their arms are built of wood with cupboard hinges for elbows. All the puppets are made of cedar, their faces carved in that distinctive lugubrious style also found in Palmer’s children’s book illustrations. And here’s the latest innovation – a puppet whose face changes expression. The Trouts have carved a series of different faces for him – happy, angry, sad – which can be inserted into the front of his head.
The set features painted reproductions of details from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes. The props include an imitation of one of Carême’s famous pièces montées, or elaborate pastry centerpieces – a copy of Bruegel the Elder’s Tower of Babel. Next to it is a miniature guillotine complete with a tiny, decapitated puppet head lying in the basket. "You can’t do the French Revolution without that," says Pearce with a grin.
Carême excelled at the art of the centrepiece, which may well stand as a symbol for all that is both sublime and ridiculous in haute cuisine. "He claimed confectionary was a branch of architecture," says Palmer. "He’d create ancient Greek ruins, dioramas of Roman battles, out of almond paste, crème tartar and spun sugar. Somebody said he had managed to reproduce the entire world in almond paste. But these things were almost totally inedible."
Being a writer, Palmer often serves as spokesman for the Trouts, but the troupe really functions as a collective, with the four puppeteers – Palmer, Pearce, Steve Kenderes and Peter Balkwill – conceiving and building a show together. They brainstormed Last Supper last summer, while hanging out on Palmer’s grandfather’s ranch near Fort Macleod and soaking in various hot springs in the B.C. interior.
Like two of the Trouts’ previous shows – 2000’s Istvan and Beowulf, which premièred at One Yellow Rabbit in 2002 – this one won’t have any spoken dialogue. Instead, soundscape artist Peter Moller, who won a Betty Mitchell Award for his memorable work on Beowulf, is creating another complex sound design crammed with foley effects.
"With the soundscape, it will become almost a dance piece, with the puppets’ movements choreographed to the prerecorded foley," says Pearce.
After its première at the Rodeo, the show will remain in the Big Secret Theatre for an extended post-festival run, and then go on the road for gigs at Regina’s Globe Theatre, Edmonton’s Catalyst Theatre and possibly Victoria.
So, given the subject of the play, do the Trouts love cooking themselves?
"Nah," says Palmer, laughing. "We just talk about it, think about it, read about it. Although, this workshop is characterized by the constant and wondrous production of various stews that keep everybody rolling. So I guess we’d situate ourselves on the peasant end of cooking." |
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