culture
Plainly Stunning
In Penny Plain, Ronnie Burkett celebrates 25 years of puppetry with a beautiful performance in an ugly world.
Penny Plain and her reliable companion, Geoffrey. Puppets by Ronnie Burkett / Theatre of Marionettes. Photo by Trudy Lee.
Penny Plain
Factory Theatre (125 Bathurst Street)
January 20 to February 26
PWYC to $55
Canadian theatre magician Ronnie Burkett has spent the last 25 years creating stunningly lifelike marionettes with his company, Theatre of Marionettes, while honing techniques that transform the puppets from inanimate objects to emotive beings right before our eyes. But beware assumptions that Burkett’s puppets spend their time singing folk songs and dancing in kick lines—these marionettes have far more sinister desires. Burkett’s latest production, Penny Plain, on now at Factory Theatre, has a warning for children under 14 just to ensure you avoid such a potentially traumatic mistake.
Through news-broadcast clips (featuring the voices of Andy Barrie, Jeanne Beker, Peter Hinton, and Anusree Roy, among others) that chronicle society’s plummet into chaos and the imminent destruction of the world, we’re plunged into the seemingly last safe haven on earth—the living room of Penny, an aging blind woman whose home is being used as a boarding house for those still clinging to a semblance of a life. Penny’s lack of sight hardly bothers her, she tells her beloved companion Geoffrey the dog—she “chose to stop seeing long ago.” When Geoffrey leaves to “become a man” in the mayhem outside, Penny chooses a replacement companion to fill the armchair beside hers: a young pigtailed orphan girl named Tuppence, who tells Penny she can be any kind of dog the blind woman wishes her to be.
Meanwhile, the upheaval outside begins to seep inside the boarding house through several tenants, including two southern camo-clad intruders and the screeching mother-daughter pair of Queenie and Jubilee, who become more and more poisonous to each other the more time they spend together. Hope remains, though, in Tuppence, her gas-masked friend Oliver, and Evelyn, a young woman who sought out the fabled puppet maker Gepetto to make her a son.
On the whimsical bi-level set—also designed by Burkett to enable his handling of several puppets at once—the boarding house is slowly overtaken by natural elements, beginning with a few blades of grass and ending in a burgeoning forest, as the stories of Penny, Tuppence, Gepetto, and Evelyn progress. As Penny shuts her mind to the impending apocalypse, her world becomes a place of life and promise, with a result that is terrifying one moment, beautiful the next.
While Burkett’s detailed puppets and masterful control over their slightest gestures are incredible sights, there are elements to Penny Plain that elevate it from a mere showcase of his craft. Sound by John Alcorn and lighting by Kevin Humphrey match perfectly with Burkett’s twisted characters to create truly terrifying moments—some blatant and some much more subtle. Several characters are entirely detestable (and not in the enjoyable way), but the opening scene between Penny and Geoffrey and Tuppence’s purity and sweetness are enough to remind anyone that in the midst of pandemonium, fear, and hate, beauty can still survive.
Such dark material performed by such typically joyous toys is not new territory for Burkett, but it’s still working, even after 25 years. And that’s plain to see.