Review
PROVENANCE
Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes
Created and performed by Ronnie Burkett
Presented by Alberta Theatre Projects
Runs until April 4
Martha Cohen Theatre (Epcor Centre)
It’s said that a shark has to constantly move forward or else it will die. I don’t know if the same law applies to puppeteers, but it certainly seems to be the case with Ronnie Burkett. The puppet artist and his marvellous Theatre of Marionettes keep pushing into new territory with every production.
If his Memory Dress Trilogy made us take Burkett seriously as a playwright, his new play, Provenance, bids to have us recognize him as an actor. Although he continues to impress us with his marionette work, this time he frequently sets down the strings and draws our attention to his onstage presence, operating doll puppets on a tabletop, wearing puppet heads attached to a headband that float before his face like tiny masks, or simply eschewing any kind of puppet at all. In the past, he has played with the puppeteer’s God-like role and interacted with his wooden characters, but now he makes it clear that he is these characters, assuming their voices and personalities even as their bodies remain hanging in the closet.
The pitfall of the experiment is that his marionettes do not always "come to life" in the way they have in the past, although when they do, it’s enchanting. This time I fell in love with Provenance’s unlikely heroine, the plain but plucky little art history student Pity (short for Pittance) Beane, who belongs in the pantheon of great Burkett creations alongside Edna Rural of Street of Blood and the eponymous pensioner of Happy. The play concerns her quest to discover the origins of a lushly romantic art nouveau painting and its delectable subject – a naked, swooning youth – who has obsessed her since her teens.
Pity’s search takes her to a fantastic Viennese brothel, whose denizens include a smorgasbord of garish whores out of a Lina Wertmuller movie, their Hitler-like overseer, a lovable Jewish-American client and a singing, roller-skating monkey. There, Pity meets Leda, the brothel’s ancient, half-daft English madam, who carries the secret of the painting and its subject deep in her complicated past.
As Leda peels away her successive layers of identity over the decades – artist, singer, socialite – Pity also reveals to us her own humble Canadian background, which is less exotic than the madam’s but much more moving. Her tales of growing up as the asexual, picked-on daughter of a gay couple are both hilarious and heart-rending and showcase Burkett’s writing at its wittiest and most evocative. Pity’s comically rapturous descriptions of watching a school play or a locker-room full of young jocks are much more authentically poetic than the rhyming verse he uses elsewhere to suggest an elevated tone, which sounds at best affected and at worst (in an angry anti-war tirade) like doggerel.
The show also begins to slip near the end, as Pity and Leda finally disclose the traumatic experiences that have led them to associate love with pain, followed by the climactic revelation of the violent story behind the pretty picture. Here, as one harrowing episode piles upon another, Burkett loses his finesse as both puppeteer and actor, becoming so consumed with a passionate outrage that it only diminishes the final cathartic effect he is aiming for.
Still, I’d rather watch Burkett miss the mark than other artists of smaller ambitions succeed. And as an overall production, Provenance is another triumph for the Theatre of Marionettes team. The elegant brothel set with its sylvan motif (designed by Burkett) and the credible mock-art nouveau painting (executed by Burkett), are enhanced by Bill Williams’s chiaroscuro lighting and Cathy Nosaty’s delicate music to create a pervasive mood of tenderness and melancholy. The puppets – especially the lumpy, bespectacled Pity with her little-girl party dress – are as humorous and lifelike as ever. Burkett really doesn’t need to prove his chops as an actor – he’s already much more than that. |
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