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“Long Live These Puppets”
October 24, 2007
The Old Trout Puppet Workshop’s Famous Puppet Death Scenes has all the characteristics of the last piece they toured to Toronto (from Calgary), The Unlikely Birth of Istvan: wit, inventiveness, and masterful manipulation of the puppets themselves.

Death Scenes is a series of 22 (or 23, depending on how you count) short scenarios depicting the deaths of a few dozen puppets. These scenarios have ostensibly been collected by the show’s “host,” Nathaniel Tweak, a nearly mummified rod puppet with a shock of white hair. Tweak appears regularly to comment on the action, philosophize about death, and to perform The Perfect Death Scene.

A gallows humor tone arguably dominates the show. Such humor is given manic expression in the second scene, Das Bipsy und Mumu Puppenspiel. The German-language sketch depicts a pair of triangular rubber figures-Bipsy and Mumu-ultra-happy game-show contestants who must choose between doors labeled “Ja” and “Nein.” The humor here resides partly in the scene’s “Price Is Right” atmosphere and partly in the horrendous ends these innocent jiggling flaps of silicon inevitably meet. Slightly less manic are the four (or five) scenes from The Feverish Heart dispersed throughout the show. The first establishes a basic pattern for the rest: a bullet-headed figure succumbs to a sucker-punch from an enormous fist in a way reminiscent of Beckett’s Act Without Words. Subsequent Heart scenes develop the bullet-head-and-fist motif to include a cranium-inflating contest (it ends badly) and a mating ritual that serves as a meditation on the timeless dance between eros and thanatos.

More interesting are those departures from what might be considered conventional puppetry. In the wordless Never Say it Again, a performer carts out a huge picture-book and begins turning the pages, pointing to the house painted in the book. With each new page the house gets larger and the sounds of a violent argument over the sound system become louder. Finally, we hear the fatal blow and the performer slowly closes the book to wheel it offstage. The Last Whale demonstrates another way to re-conceptualize puppet theatre. Here a beautiful light, which seems to be reflected off blue water, plays upon the wooden Art-Deco puppet theatre façade. When the façade’s large central curtain (smaller ones flank it left and right) opens, it is filled with the side of a whale’s face; its eye then slowly and silently closes, signaling the beast’s death.

Death Scenes is at its best during such moments, when the Old Trouts demonstrate a talent for simplicity and mystery. Funeral Ritual of the Sugawara Dunju is particularly evocative. A ghostly white light illuminates what seems to be a spear thrust into the space from stage right. To the accompaniment of soft Asian music a puppeteer visible to us brings in a puppet (suggested only by a hand-held mask and the puppet’s arm) from stage left and slowly and determinedly manipulates the head as a pair of white curtains pass over the figure who dies a quiet and dignified death.

Tweak’s Perfect Death Scene strikes a similar tone. Two crouching performers “walk” the host out in front of the façade, taking great pains not to jar each other as they cause the puppet to move with considerable subtlety. As the Grim Reaper (a third performer wrapped in a sheet, with a puppet head in place of his own) looks on, Tweak attempts to recite a monologue, but dies from the effort. The recitation itself is less moving than the care with which two puppeteers lay down the body; the gentleness with which they handle him is actually so affecting that something-the performers’ tenderness, some former spark of animation-lingers as the Reaper lifts the slack body in his arms.

Not all of the death scenes are this fine, however. Indeed, the company might have reduced the total number of deaths and expanded the more austere, mysterious sketches. Still, much of Death Scenes should come as a revelation to audiences in Toronto. The city gets to see very little puppet theatre (which is not to disparage the excellent puppeteers we do have) and the Old Trouts are helping to fill a major and lamentable gap in our own performing arts scene.

Famous Puppet Death Scenes continues at the Young Centre until October 27. For tickets and information call 416-866-8666 or go to www.youngcentre.ca