I went to see
Penny Plain at the National Arts Centre. A play done entirely with puppets. And not for kids - tickets were not sold to those under fourteen.
I have a friend who is a puppeteer, and Ronnie Burkett is one of her heroes. I really didn't know what to expect.
It didn't convert me to a love of puppetry, for two reasons that have nothing to do with the story. First, the voices: there was too much shouting. As is often the case in animation, they didn't sound like normal voices, or normal speech.
Second, the body language. They looked like people (more or less) or dogs, as the case may be. But they didn't move like people. Or dogs. The best was the baby with a plastic-bottle head, who moved rather like a real baby in the end.
The story was... I wasn't sure what to make of it. It struck me as either pretentious our formless, or possibly both. It's about a post-apocalyptic Canada, seen through the eyes of the boarders in Penny Plain's boarding-house, and their various misadventures. None of it engaged or convinced me much, though it had its moments. The sense of humour (mostly dark and/or scatological) passed me by. My favourite bit was when the crazy old lady bricked the invading Americans up in the basement and her daughter was angry because they could have eaten them. I rather appreciated the very end, with the baby crying, too.
I'm still not sure if I just didn't get the point, or if there was such a lack of structure there was no point to get.
At the end, when Ronnie Burkett stepped off his platform and took his bows, I had a moment of shock how big he was. My eyes had grown accustomed to the pint-sized puppets.
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